It takes two: Records management and workflow

It takes two to make a thing go right

“It Takes Two,” the hit song by New York hip-hop artists Rob Base and the recently deceased DJ E-Z Rock, has been running through my head all day.

One of the cool things about enterprise content management software (ECM) is that there are many components, and some benefit certain organizations more than others. Looking at this by industry, Michael Croal, Senior Director at Cornerstone Advisors, has done an awesome job explaining what capabilities produce the best results for financial services. In one of his “greatest hits” GonzoBanker articles, The Other ERM – Electronic Records Management, he focuses on two ECM technologies – records management and workflow.

Records management is essential for credit unions. Information assets are only growing and becoming more complex to retain, manage and comply with corporate, domestic and international records management standards. With records management, you capture documents and information electronically, making everything instantly available in a secure, central location. Gone are the days when you have to play detective to find what you need.

Add workflow to the mix and you can automate processes like declaring documents as records – ensuring records are complete, facilitating record disposition and proving compliance through reporting. An ECM solution provides a single repository which also logs every time a user accesses, views, edits, or acts on a document. You can even make these audit trails available to external auditors via a secure website, helping to avoid costly penalties and ensuring corporate and industry compliance standards are met.

It takes two to make it outta sight

If that hasn’t yet convinced you to take another look at utilizing records management and workflow, maybe this will. 

Managing the retention of closed accounts and paid loan documentation with paper means you’re organization is adding costs and risks to the process. Not only is paper expensive to store and ship, it’s also susceptible to damage or theft.

By utilizing records management and workflow, the closed loan and/or paid account reports that are generated by your core application are COLD processed into your ECM system. The ECM system reads the reports and parses out the individual loan/member numbers and generates a unique record for each number, adding it to the appropriate managed folder.

All without any paper.

Then, the unique record automatically enters the appropriate workflow. Workflow initiates the retention process at the managed folder level, while records management controls the retention schedules. The appropriate administrators are also prompted for the approval to purge the folder according to your financial institution’s retention policies.

The powerful combination of records management and workflow increases both the speed and accuracy of the process, yielding the best ROI for credit unions that have invested in an ECM solution.

It does take two. If you want to do it right, that is.