New Bitkom Study: Enterprise Content Management in Medium-Sized Companies

Have you ever searched your e-mail accounts for a specific message that was sent to you years ago? Then you know exactly how laborious it is to search through mountains of old correspondence. In your private e-mails, you may give up in exasperation after some time and look for the required information elsewhere. But that’s not always an option! For this reason, in a business environment, all business-related correspondence (even e-mails!) must be kept for up to ten years in accordance with Section 147 of the German Fiscal Code. This is a particular challenge for medium-sized companies that are growing.

This is why more and more medium-sized companies have been using Enterprise Content Management technology for some years. Instead of storing business documents only on the local hard drive of the employee’s computer, they are stored on a central document server, managed in a version-secure manner, provided with metadata, and archived. The decisive factor in Enterprise Content Management is that all authorized employees can access and work with all relevant data from all workstations (and more and more often, also while on the move).

The IT industry association bitkom, of which OPTIMAL SYSTEMS is a member, has examined the use of Enterprise Content Management solutions in medium-sized companies in its study “ECM in Medium-Sized Companies – Status Quo and Perspectives on the Way to the Digital Office.” Some of the insights gained here are quite remarkable – we have summarized the most important ones for you below.

Large companies as ECM pioneers

The larger the company, the earlier it uses software for Enterprise Content Management: On average, large companies have already been using an appropriate software solution for ten years, while medium-sized companies, on average, have only been using ECM for six. Only one in three medium-sized companies already has an ECM solution in place.

Of these, only a third use this solution company-wide - for the majority, the ECM solution remains limited to individual specialist departments such as Controlling, Purchasing or Human Resources. Large companies, which typically have several locations and a more decentralized structure, are well ahead of medium-sized companies with a rate of over 90% company-wide use. Often, they are already thinking about replacing their existing ECM software, while many SMEs are currently planning to introduce a company-wide solution.

Medium-sized companies rely on flexibility

Almost every third medium-sized company still manages its internal knowledge in individual Office documents. Many companies have developed their own organization systems that work more or less well. When introducing an ECM that is intended to manage this accumulated flood of data, adaptability and flexibility are understandably very important. It is remarkable that these factors are even more important for SMEs than the implementation and operating costs.

The new software should integrate as seamlessly as possible into the usual work processes in order to minimize training costs and avoid the time-consuming restructuring of large databases. enaio® from OPTIMAL SYSTEMS shines with its versatile expandability (including its own interfaces and seamless Office integration) and can therefore be flexibly adapted to the requirements of the application.

IT resources are scarce and therefore valuable, especially in medium-sized companies. This is probably the main reason why almost half (44%) of SMEs currently rely on an external solution to store their CRM content instead of operating their own data center on their premises ("on-premise"). In contrast, 74% of large companies rely on their own server park, from which all ECM locations can be supplied.

enaio® from OPTIMAL SYSTEMS naturally takes mobile working into account without compromising on data protection and provides clients that enable secure and location-independent working with different end devices and browsers.

All in all, the bitkom study sees enterprise content management in the medium-sized sector as a sector full of growth opportunities. Every fourth medium-sized company is planning to procure an ECM solution in the near future. The market volume is estimated at over 1.2 billion euros.

It naturally makes us very confident to see the enaio® ECM suite from OPTIMAL SYSTEMS at the forefront of awareness among SMEs. We have already helped many medium-sized companies to successfully take the step into the digital future.