Engineering organisations clearly recognise the potential offered by document management systems to maintain and store unstructured content. That they are needed is a fact rarely disputed, but the selection of an appropriate and flexible solution has long been a major business and financial headache, as companies feel they often do not operate to their full potential. By Tim Taylor.

Controlling and managing the movement of information, particularly drawing related documentation throughout its lifecycle is a key issue within the engineering sector. In the current economic climate, organisations must achieve more with less resource, and are recognising that they need to have an integrated strategy that brings together class leading, highly efficient and effective business processes implemented consistently in a way that is repeatable, measurable and flexible.
Companies are now looking to deploy applications to manage specific document processes within an overall enterprise infrastructure. Daratech noted that companies involved in process manufacturing were looking for out-of-the-box solutions for document lifecycle management.
Engineering programmes are frequently spread across multiple departments and third party organisations, which makes keeping track of progress on individual projects a complex task with much associated commercial and compliance risk. To achieve this the information needs to be drawn from a variety of sources and requires the linking of business processes with content management - companies need to organise and control drawings, emails, contracts and associated project data, in relation to these business processes.
Poor management of that data can be problematic and costly if businesses cannot provide information to support engineering queries. In today's climate, as companies focus on streamlining business processes to improve compliance and profitability, the issue of creating a more flexible infrastructure is becoming a key talking point, particularly in an environment with heavy regulatory issues. An effective system should enable accountability through the identification of the state and value of any document or drawing related to the operational procedures they support.
In response to these challenges, software applications built on electronic content management platforms are evolving to help handle document lifecycles more effectively and manage, store and distribute the relevant information from these growing information sources.
This new breed of application is returning control to the company, as the software is easy to configure and does not involve the traditional high consultancy costs associated with the customisation of document management platforms mentioned above. This approach benefits the end-user as applications can quickly adapt to the changing business environment, as opposed to bespoke applications, which have actually slowed down the ability to change. Companies are finally in a position where they dictate the future application landscape within their organisation and can ultimately improve the business processes, document workflow and management of content across all projects. This change in the document management sector reflects the progression seen in other sectors.

Document management is now seen as a platform in its own right, rather than just an application running on a database. Out-of-the-box applications are now appearing, to run on top of the core document management platform to manage specific tasks, such as drawing, SOP and transmittal management.
With these new configurable applications, organisations now have far greater control of their application development. Intellectual property is no longer in the hands of the consultants. We are now looking at a situation where the business process requirements are driving the applications created. This represents a major break-through on the traditional model, where processes were changed to reflect the functionality of a given application, or worse still, the roll-out of new business applications was hindered due to the fact that system upgrades were slow to execute.
For example, applications can manage and track the document approval process between internal and external parties, reflecting business processes or specific contractual agreements, as well as managing the audit trail of each document. Equally, foundation applications are now emerging to enable companies to take key business processes, such as drawing management and get a system up and running that may require minor configurations to match their key business process rules. These newly emerging applications will ultimately help speed up project lifecycles and reduce costs.
The ability of these new configurable applications to manage unstructured content, will afford organisations a great deal more flexibility than they have traditionally been used to with a customised approach.
This is not only important from an initial implementation perspective, but equally relevant when looking at the ongoing costs, changes and amendments. As processes are updated and the associated systems have to follow suit, document lifecycle applications will enable organisations to reconfigure the applications themselves, without recourse to external support.
The flexibility afforded by such a solution is of particular importance to those market sectors in which regulatory compliance is an essential part of their business operations. With many regulatory bodies frequently updating the details of compliance, it is essential that applications can be updated quickly and in a compliant manner to support both the current and future needs of any organisation operating in such an environment.
This degree of flexibility is crucial for the continuation of business operations and the improved management of documentation can even provide a competitive advantage by reducing the period of time required for a project to reach completion.
Regardless of the quality of the platform upon which a document management solution is built, the only way to guarantee that it will meet your business needs is through further development. Whilst both customisation and configuration offer the ability to create a bespoke solution, configuration provides a cheaper (to implement, run and update), faster (to design and develop) and more flexible solution to meet the changing needs of your business.

The evolution that is being witnessed in the document management sector can only prove beneficial to the engineering community. It is clear that considerable savings can be made by using a configurable application to provide further functionality and flexibility to the management and flow of information. The configurable nature of these new applications mean that they can provide an extra level of flexibility to the core enterprise infrastructure, which will enable organisations to reap real business benefits from their deployment, but more importantly ensure that they are in control of business process evolution.

Tim Taylor is Chief Business Development Officer at McLaren, www.mclarekvisia.com