ECM: Transition to content services continues

Enterprise content management (ECM) has been changing its focus and has become a feature-rich, dynamic content services solution that addresses numerous business problems, ranging from contract lifecycle management to integrating heterogeneous medical systems.

OmniTRAX is a railroad and transportation management company that requires nearly 150 different types of contracts to support its agreements with customers and partners. Preparing and reviewing the contracts required at least 14 days and sometimes up to 40 days, depending on how many agreements were required for a job. Several employees might be dedicated just to searching for the contracts needed, and during these searches, the work of other employees was slowed or even stopped as they waited for the documents.

The commercial team that writes the agreements wanted to automate 85% of this work in order to improve quality and efficiency and provide greater visibility into the review process. After evaluating numerous vendors, the team selected SpringCM, a DocuSign company, for its cloud-based platform, search, and workflow capabilities as well as its integration with DocuSign, which provides a “system of agreement” platform that offers secure e-signatures.

OmniTRAX can now create contract templates, rapidly find documents or clauses needed for the contracts, and provide electronic authorization of contracts through DocuSign. In addition, the company has been able to dispense with its paper contracts, which is expected to save $50,000 annually in storage costs and ensure business continuity by making information resources less vulnerable. The speed of developing contracts has increased, and the costs of locating documents and generating new contracts have decreased.