Across industries, terabytes of new content are filling up on-premises disks and databases faster than new storage hardware can be installed. The obvious answer? Archiving to the cloud. The benefits range from reducing on-premises storage costs to improving customer experience through faster document retrieval.
We sat down with Claudia Traving, a Director of Product Marketing at OpenText™ and resident archiving technology expert, to learn more about cloud archiving.
Her 25 years of experience with both on-premises and cloud archiving solutions, such as OpenText™ Core Archive for SAP Solutions, provide her with deep insights into the day-to-day and long-term challenges of data storage.
Among the archiving-related challenges she sees most often: “Slow, paper-based processes that lead to missed opportunities. Inefficiencies that come from information siloes and manually combined data sources. And IT teams struggling to keep up with evolving internal or regulatory document storage requirements.”
Those challenges impact any organization that has yet to move to a cloud archiving solution. Focusing on SAP customers, she adds that they require “expensive appliances for large SAP databases. And as they plan to migrate large amounts of data to S/4HANA, they’re faced with longer conversion times and risky project schedules. Core Archive for SAP Solutions is designed to address all these issues,” she says.
Improving customer and employee experiences through faster processes
While cloud archiving provides a range of advantages, Traving says she sees the most significant improvements in expediting business processes.
“Almost any process is streamlined when you make electronic documents part of the workflow and shift them to a cloud archive as soon as it’s right to do so,” Traving says.
“Core Archive for SAP Solutions is designed to be process agnostic,” she explains. “It works with any business process that requires some form of document, whether that’s email, paper documents, audio, video, or any other type of digital document.”
Asked to describe an example, she points to a document intake, processing, and retrieval scenario that’s likely familiar to any organization with a contact center.
“For any chance at first-call resolution, the agent needs immediate access to the same content the customer is seeing – an invoice, for example. So, in the past, organizations felt they couldn’t readily archive that content,” Traving says. “But with cloud archiving, that information can be available instantly, without being in the way, and without using up on-premises systems.”
“And that’s a great example of the solution’s ability to securely store content and make it accessible again to business users — anytime and anywhere, and in the right business context” says Traving.
Improving compliance and security
Today, enterprises find themselves at a unique intersection: generating terabytes of documents through day-to-day business – more than ever before – and at the same time, facing ever-evolving compliance requirements.
“All countries have different laws regarding documents. For example, our customers might need to be able to produce documents in case of a tax audit or lawsuit, or simply to align with regulations such as GDPR,” Traving said.
Core Archive for SAP Solutions helps lower risk. “It provides compliance and protection through secure long-term storage of content in the cloud. And this way, your data is governed by industry-leading security and compliance practices, and protected from loss through replication and disaster recovery.”
Making it easy to move SAP data to the cloud
To address the needs of enterprises today and into the future, OpenText and SAP are helping companies make the transition from on-premises solutions to the cloud in a way that’s flexible and manageable.
Traving points to the SAP RISE program, designed to help SAP customers move to the SAP cloud. To enable a seamless migration, OpenText offers a package that bundles Core Archive for SAP Solutions together with OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions and OpenText Core Capture for SAP Solutions. These productivity solutions are a perfect fit for customers moving to S/4HANA Cloud.
“The bundle supports all S/4HANA private Cloud environments as well as the traditional environments with SAP ECC. And Core Archive for SAP Solutions has also been released as a repository for S/4HANA Cloud Essentials and the SAP Business Technology Platform, supporting SAP customers with the full range of SAP’s S/4 and ERP cloud environment,” Traving says.
“When I look at the future and our roadmap, I’m excited to continue our relationship with SAP and integrate their new environments with our solutions and deliver the same high levels of service across these environments.”
This blog has been co-authored by Rachel Teisch and Andy Teichholz.
Significant increases in the quantity and complexity of information, along with growing compliance and regulatory challenges, are contributing to the need for a faster and more effective approach to managing and conducting investigations.
Let’s take a look at what the new Compliance Week and OpenText™ survey findings, which garnered 200 responses from compliance, legal, internal audit and other professionals around the world, reveal about current investigation activities and what is needed to drive better outcomes.
Investigations and enforcement actions on the rise
Survey respondents indicated that investigations are expected to rise, most notably around employment and HR issues, cybersecurity and data privacy, and regulatory compliance. This is not surprising and is consistent with trends we have been following:
Accelerated by the pandemic, the transition to remote work has significantly disrupted traditional working patterns, resulting in a weaker lens into employee data-handling activities and behavior. Cyber attacks have also increased dramatically as the number of endpoints have skyrocketed and remote access vulnerabilities are part of the reality of the new modern workplace.
Data privacy reform has also had a large impact. Since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, many of the world’s largest countries enacted similar privacy laws. The potential financial and reputational damage associated with violations looms large, especially when security safeguards are inadequate to prevent data loss or breach. As a result, a top investigatory challenge is complying with data-breach notification requirements in which proper incident response is critical to meet stringent deadlines.
We are also entering a period of heightened scrutiny by regulators to investigate fraud, false claims and other investigations around misconduct and corruption. Whistleblowers are being encouraged, protected and incentivized more than ever, with some agency programs issuing awards at unprecedented levels.
Data collection from new electronically stored information (ESI) sources and collecting data remotely (38% and 39% respectively) are major pain points in managing and conducting investigations.
Technology is important in supporting various investigatory functions. Data collection was deemed very important by 74%, followed by eDiscovery (60%), legal hold (58%) and forensic analysis (57%).
Despite the need for improved efficiencies and outcomes, less than one-third are using more efficient and accurate techniques, including technology-assisted review (31%) and advanced analytics (30%)–with a vast majority (76%) employing manual review to identify key documents in an investigation.
Leveraging expertise: why outsource?
The survey also indicates that to address the challenges of managing investigations internally, legal and compliance teams are incorporating outside experts to support investigations, with the top area of spend cited as support from professional services/consulting and legal service providers (64%).
Tactics to manage the volume of ESI include leveraging technology-driven analytics and machine learning, combined with the use of an experienced strike team and cross collaboration to capitalize on the value each business function brings to the investigation. By incorporating a strike team that has expertise in unstructured data analytics and a strong understanding of the technology, organizations can quickly and efficiently draw connections to deliver results and insights into the data that reduce time and cost, and help drive case strategy.
For the full results of the survey, please click here to access the e-book.
Rachel Teisch
Rachel Teisch is Senior Director of Product Marketing at OpenText Discovery. She brings nearly two decades of experience in eDiscovery, and is responsible for product marketing for the OpenText Discovery suite of products. She most recently served as Vice President, Marketing, at Catalyst Repository Systems, which was acquired by OpenText in January 2019 and is now part of the OpenText Discovery portfolio.
Andy Teichholz is the Sr. Industry Strategist for Compliance and Legal at OpenText. He has over 20 years of experience in the legal and compliance industry as a litigator, in-house counsel, consultant, and technology provider. Andy is focused on helping businesses succeed with digital transformation. In this capacity, he has served as a trusted advisor to customers by leveraging his business acumen, industry experience, and technical knowledge to advise on regulatory compliance, information governance, and data privacy issues as well as support complex litigation and regulatory investigations.
A large Canadian food and pharmacy retailer, and long-time OpenText™ customer, with more than 2,500 corporate-owned retail locations serving nearly 13,000 independent distribution customers had been running OpenText™ Extended ECM on-premises since 2009. The company has a growing digital business, including online grocery orders and eCommerce sales related to its pharmacy, beauty, apparel, and lifestyle offers. Feeling the competitive pressures of an increasingly digital landscape, the retailer wanted to simplify vendor engagement and improve employee productivity through a single cloud-based portal.
Moving critical enterprise workloads to the cloud
The company originally deployed OpenText Extended ECM on-premises for archiving and records management capabilities that enabled the retailer to ensure storage and accessibility of data and information more effectively, across the entire retention period, while helping to reduce data storage costs. Previously, the company had challenges related to accessing data residing in siloed portals, sites and applications across dozens of brands and several different business units.
With the Extended ECM solution, the retailer was able to integrate with the company’s lead applications, including SAP, to bridge content and key business processes and has also been leveraged as an enterprise-wide information governance platform. But the retailer’s competitive landscape was rapidly shifting, with traditional competitors aggressively exploring ways to stay relevant and digital competitors taking more and more market share with compelling customer experiences.
In 2019 the retailer’s CIO began an initiative to move critical enterprise workloads to the cloud in an effort to maintain its status as an industry leader. The company sought to leverage cloud-based technology to modernize the vendor and employee experience while also satisfying critical information governance requirements.
Leveraging Extended ECM on OpenText Cloud, powered by Google Cloud
As part of the CIO’s cloud migration initiative, OpenText was selected and tasked with cloud-enabling the Extended ECM software licenses, packaged with OpenText™ Cloud Managed Services and public cloud infrastructure delivered by Google Cloud. The strategy eliminated what used to be distinct IT functions and replaced it with a single cloud managed services contract backed by a single SLA managed by their trusted partner, OpenText. As a part of the cloud enablement effort, OpenText modernized the retailer’s existing Extended ECM licenses to release Cloud Edition (CE), cloud native software that delivers the benefits of SaaS while leveraging their existing investment in the Extended ECM platform. The retailer was also pleased to learn that OpenText Cloud Managed Services supports Extended ECM CE on all the major public cloud platforms including their platform of choice, Google Cloud.
Providing the benefits of SaaS while delivering the expected governance and business value
OpenText Extended ECM helps organizations across industries to integrate content services with lead business systems to bridge content silos, improve process productivity, and enhance information flows between business-critical applications. By partnering with OpenText Cloud Managed Services experts to deliver Extended ECM on OpenText Cloud, powered by Google Cloud, the retailer was able to realize its goals for cloud computing while leveraging its investment in OpenText to support critical governance, productivity and innovation. Key benefits of this cloud-enabled solution include:
A cloud-native application that delivers best-in-class features and capabilities such as integrated records management, intelligent metadata management, archive and search capabilities, and version control over all business content, whether it’s stored within the platform itself or in other enterprise applications, file systems, or email. And because it is cloud native, the Extended ECM application will benefit from the services-based innovations of future releases.
OpenText Cloud powered by Google Cloud infrastructure provides customers with all the benefits of the public cloud including security, agility, reliability, security and scalability to grow their business.
OpenText Cloud Managed Services free customers from the burden of data center and application management so that they can focus on innovating their business, delighting customers and defeating the competition.
Connect enterprise content with digital business with OpenText and Google Cloud and choose a managed service solution from the most comprehensive suite of Information Management (IM) products available in the cloud today, delivered on the world-class infrastructure of Google Cloud. Learn how OpenText and Google Cloud help customers go cloud-first and optimize processes, safeguard mission-critical information governance and management, and improve productivity.
In a recent Forrester Consulting Study, it was revealed that 64% of organizations that store all their content on-premises believe they’re at a competitive disadvantage. The reality is that migrating at least some content to the cloud is vital to stay competitive and resilient.
OpenText™ Extended ECM Cloud Edition (CE) is a cloud-native, containerized platform which lets customers run anywhere – simpler, better, and faster.
The benefits of migrating to the cloud are numerous, including:
Deploy and run anywhere – On-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud; containerized or on traditional VMs
Manage faster and easier – Cloud-native platforms support automated deployment, scaling and management
Get regular updates with the latest features – Adopting new features is now faster, simpler, and more cost-effective
Customize with confidence – Isolate custom changes to minimize the effort involved in syncing with future updates
Moving to the cloud is a big decision for many organizations – but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing! Consider a hybrid approach and take an as-needed approach to moving content to the cloud. Companies can gain the agility and flexibility of cloud content management while migrating at their own pace, maintaining some on-premises investments. With the ability to move to the cloud of your choice, you can accelerate digital transformation and free up resources for creativity and innovation.
Reason #2: Improve user experience
Increased adoption and improved user experience are key factors in considering upgrading your Content Suite or Extended ECM deployment. OpenText completely redefined the legacy Classic View user experience with the introduction of the Smart View.
Designed to give end-users the flexibility and control to customize the way they want to work, the Smart View eliminates adoption as a barrier to ECM success. Productivity is enhanced through extensible, role-based views that promote access and collaboration.
Benefits of utilizing the Smart View include:
Improve adoption with a touch-friendly, responsive design, and role-based landing/browsing alongside single click context-sensitive help
Maximize productivity with smartly designed features like version compare with in-place viewer, ad-hoc signatures, inline forms, large file uploads, workflow, and activity feeds
Strengthen governance with easy access to view and modify metadata
Align UI to the task at hand with Perspective Manager, an interactive, drag and drop tool designed to simplify configuration and customization of the UI
Seamlessly extend and integrate the Smart View to other applications with easily reusable HTML5 Content Server UI Widgets
Example of the SmartView user interface demonstrating the version compare with in-place viewer. The modular panel allows users to navigate through the content easily and compare versions.
Reason #3: Improve productivity
Business professionals face countless content challenges in locating and sharing information across different departments in the modern workplace. Organizations need solutions that speak to their specific departmental needs, are user centric and deliver immediate value. Business Admins and IT need pre-configured applications and out-of-the-box examples to get up and running quickly.
Introducing Business Scenarios
Pre-configured, ready-to-use applications available at no additional charge with Extended ECM 21.4 upgrade. Currently, there are four Business Scenarios available: Teamspaces, Projects, Agreements, and Enterprise Asset Management (SAP), with more to come in future releases.
Teamspaces: Use this Business Scenario to simplify collaboration for all business users across the organization.
Projects: Use this Business Scenario to keep an eye on the overall health of a project by tracking project phases and key milestones.
Agreements: Use this Business Scenario to manage the lifecycle of important documents from draft to signature.
Enterprise Asset Management (SAP): Use this Business Scenario to support enterprise asset management (EAM) processes. This Business Scenario is tightly integrated with the SAP EAM software to facilitate workflows, data synchronization, and document exchange.
This Projects Business Scenario has been created by a project manager for the project – Solar Panels for Car. The Metadata widget shows project-specific information such as scope, sponsor, stakeholders. The project team can access all phases of the project seamlessly from the Phases widget and collaborate through the Discussions widget.
Benefits of using Business Scenarios include:
Leverage turnkey workspaces to aggregate content, data, people, and tasks related to a common business purpose
Boost productivity and collaboration with features like nested workspaces, workflows, metadata, tile/widget displays, dashboards, reports, and threaded discussions
Eliminate inefficiencies by aligning teams, content, and collaborative business processes
Free up valuable IT resources and simplify deployment with pre-configured and documented solutions
Improve Information Governance by removing the risk of ad hoc information exchange
Reduce information silos with a foundation that integrates content to lead applications such as the SAP EAM system
Reason #4: Achieve compliance through automated information governance
Organizations that do not employ a comprehensive information governance strategy are vulnerable to compliance issues, high costs of litigation, confidentiality breaches, and more. By adopting a disciplined, enterprise-wide records management strategy, records managers and compliance officers ensure compliance with external regulations and internal policies.
A key component of Extended ECM, Records Management provides a common classification service for all types of information. Records managers benefit from automated and transparent processes that remove the complexity and labor requirements traditionally associated with managing critical enterprise information.
Benefits of using Records Management include:
Simplify and automate records retention and reduction
Ensure the long-term preservation of critical content
Visualize information governance via dashboards
Automated governance removes the risks of ad hoc information exchange
Check out this customer story from Sprint, who estimates they have reclaimed over one terabyte worth of storage space and reduced their legal fees associated with eDiscovery by 50% annually using Records Management.
Reason #5: Protect information with a secure platform
As organizations adapt to an information-based economy, the threats and risk profile of information security grow. Today’s threats are more potent than ever, and organizations need robust content services infrastructure to defend information from malicious attacks both internally and externally. This infrastructure, combined with a disciplined approach to information governance, fundamentally reduces the organization’s risk profile.
Upgrading to the Extended ECM 21.4 release comes with:
Security fixes including crucial third-party library updates such as OpenSSL
New security features around managing Secrets (DB passwords, OTDS passwords, etc.) supporting confidentiality, integrity, and availability that make it easier for organizations to meet requirements for FedRAMP compliance
Integration with Azure Information Protection (available with M365 extension) to further secure and protect information
Finally, it’s good to know that existing features like Dynamic Security Clearancemonitors attributes, such as file security, geolocation, and clearance levels, in real-time to protect information and ensure only the right people have access to the correct information, thereby protecting information from internal security threats.
Reason #6: Empower your distributed workforce
The way people work is evolving. With the rise of working from home, employees expect more flexibility and are getting increasingly creative with how, where, and when they do their work.
Many remote knowledge workers are currently using Microsoft® 365 applications such as Microsoft Teams to collaborate and share content with their teams. However, this creates a disconnect between collaboration and the content in lead business applications. OpenText™ Extended ECM can help organizations bridge this gap by integrating Extended ECM with Microsoft 365 applications:
Full synchronization with Microsoft Teams – Improve access and collaboration on Extended ECM content with full synchronization of documents and subfolders between Business Workspaces and Teams
An example of the OpenText Extended ECM synchronization with Microsoft Teams
Manage Microsoft Teams lifecycle – govern Teams content from creation to archiving and disposition
Simplify business processes – increase user productivity when using leading business applications and Microsoft 365 apps
Single source of truth – get complete visibility into business process and associated content
Maintain control over enterprise information – control the entire information lifecycle and mitigate risk by applying records management classifications
Agile organizations also understand that productivity knows no boundaries, with an increasing need for mobile access to business content. Our mobile application provides a secure mobile connection to enterprise content and processes, allowing iOS and Android smartphone users to view and interact with Extended ECM information while away from their desk. The CE 21.4 upgrade comes with the ability to scan multiple pages of a document and upload them as a PDF file.
Examples of the OpenText mobile application for Extended ECM.
Key benefits of enabling your remote workforce include:
Quickly access information from mobile devices with the familiar style of Smart View
Ensure compliance and mitigate security threats by leveraging existing Extended ECM user access, permission controls, and security policies
View documents on smartphones without the application that generated the content. View documents without VPN or offline
Edit content with direct access to third-party mobile device editors, such as Microsoft® Word, and save back to Extended ECM
In-app tutorial for new users to speed adoption
Content Server Mobile is a free mobile app that ships with Content Suite and all Extended ECM bundles both on-premises and in the cloud.
Curious to try it out yourself? Access an interactive, click-through mobile app tour and play around with the different options and paths while seeing how easy it is to navigate Extended ECM and browse, view, download, and edit documents on a smartphone or tablet.
Reason #7: Increase ROI by leveraging additional OpenText capabilities
Modernizing your platform puts your organization in the ideal position to leverage additional product capabilities. Here are just a few of the many products that can be easily integrated into your platform to increase value for your existing investment.
OpenText™ Magellan™: Augment data-driven decision making and accelerate business with advanced artificial intelligence in a pre-built machine learning and big data analytics platform.
OpenText Exstream™: Leverage the data and content that already exists within the organization to transform typical customer communications into highly-personalized, engaging customer experiences on the preferred digital and print channels, screen sizes and devices of the customer.
OpenText™ Intelligent Capture: Automate content ingestion, speeding up the routing of information to the right users and system in the organization. Combine standard capture features, such as optical character recognition (OCR), with powerful machine learning, capture extracts information from content and automatically routes it to the right user and right lead system.
OpenText™ Intelligent Viewing: A cloud-first universal viewing solution which offers secure viewing and collaboration. It provides in-house and remote employees with consistent, reliable access to content while ensuring that it never leaves the repository. Users can collaborate on almost any file type, transform files from various formats into PDF or TIFF. The solution is flexible and scalable with a containerized architecture and can be deployed anywhere.
OpenText™ AppWorks™: Enable business and technical users to rapidly build, iterate and deploy low-code, process-centric and case management applications.
OpenText™ Magellan™ Risk Guard: leverages advanced AI capabilities uncover harmful, sensitive and inappropriate text, visual and audio content within enterprise content. Once identified, this content can be acted upon with a few clicks to increase compliance, improve data governance and reduce file storage costs.
Reason #8: Eliminate data silos by integrating with existing applications
Ready to take the next step in your content services journey and integrate your Content Suite implementation to lead applications to bridge content silos and expedite information flows? OpenText offers a solution which does just that: OpenText Extended ECM. Extended ECM utilizes the familiar interface of the Content Suite Smart View and the same Workspace model to integrate information from lead applications directly into your content management platform.
Some benefits of upgrading your Content Suite investment to Extended ECM include:
Transparently integrate with other leading applications such as SAP S/4HANA®, SAP® SuccessFactors®, Salesforce®, Microsoft® Office 365® or any other process-driving software
Bridge content silos and intelligently automates business processes to allow information to flow effortlessly across applications
Leverage existing investment in Content Suite and other applications, while improving transparency and insight to improve decision making, automate business processes and expand the reach of governance policies
Extended ECM Platform connects Content Suite to lead applications like Salesforce, SAP ERP and SuccessFactors, Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics and more.
Reason #9: Choose from flexible deployment options
Organizations consume OpenText software and services in multiple ways, depending on their need and company strategy. Containerized systems can run alongside existing ones to enable a manageable cloud adoption path. There are five delivery options for OpenText solutions, with a planned option on the Red Hat Open shift.
Delivery options for OpenText solutions
Reason #10: Power modern work
Modern work is unconstrained by time or space. A new cohort of workers takes mobility and flexibility for granted. They are fueled by information and thrive on collaboration and connection. Modern work calls for new tools and new ways of thinking about information management. As organizations regroup, reorganize, and reprioritize over, they’ll be doing so in a new normal. IDC FutureScape Worldwide Future of Work 2022 predictions state that “40% of Global 2000 firms will see 25% improvement in information usage by 2026 due to investments in intelligent knowledge networks that turn structured/unstructured data into findable and actionable knowledge”.
Here are some of the ways in which modernizing your Content Suite investment can help your organization adapt and thrive post-crisis:
Efficient access to information – Nurture a strong culture and keep employees engaged with simple user experiences that span customers, clients, and employees
Process stability and efficiency – Integrate content with the applications people work in every day ensuring information is at hand when, and where it’s needed
Collaboration and teamwork – Collaborate seamlessly and securely with both internal and external parties
Governance – Adopt a holistic approach that comprehensively monitors how that information is shared, modified and used across all content repositories
Find the release dates and subsequent sustaining maintenance for your OpenText products by visiting the Support Lifecycle page on My Support (customer login required).
Listen to the Top 10 reasons to upgrade your Content Suite and Extended ECM OT Live Webinar and access the eBook here. Accelerate your upgrade and reduce risk by working with OpenText Professional Services.
Who’d have thought the humble invoice was a superhero? Yet, slip a digital cloak on it and it becomes the scourge of tax fraud. Governments worldwide have recognized this; today there are more than 50 e-Invoicing mandates worldwide, and many more coming into force over the next few years.
The day is fast approaching when, if a manufacturer doesn’t have an effective and compliant enterprise e-Invoicing solution, it will be extremely challenging to continue conducting business – and may not be possible at all in some countries and regions. If this sounds alarmist, it’s worth noting that Italy has already imposed mandates that all business-to-government and business-to-business invoices be digital.
The VAT gap – the difference between what a country is owed in tax and what it receives – can stand at more than 30% in some areas of the world. During the pandemic, the EU VAT gap grew to €164 billion. Yet the EU reports it has been able to reduce its gap by 10% over the last decade. With revenues stretched, it’s no leap to assume governments will double down on their attempts to use e-Invoicing as a fiscal weapon.
The complex global environment for e-Invoicing
Today, the world’s top manufacturing hubs are in a state of flux. Normal economic changes have been exacerbated by the fall-out of the pandemic. The supply chain vulnerabilities it exposed have made every manufacturer re-consider the resilience of its operations and markets. While manufacturers still readily engage with major hubs, re-shoring and near-shoring are growing trends, which are likely to accelerate as companies look to establish supply chains that are shorter, simpler and more sustainable.
Against this backdrop, effective e-Invoicing – especially for global manufacturers – becomes a major challenge. The amount of regulations and mandates continue to rise but is not being mirrored by a growth in common formats or standards. In the current environment, almost every country and region interprets e-Invoicing in a slightly different way and stipulates different formats and standards.
Recently, I was talking with a representative from a large European manufacturer that was working to create a single e-Invoicing platform. I was struck by not just the many different ways the company currently trades with partners, but also the number of different e-Invoicing standards and iterations of the same standard it has to support.
Compliant E-Invoicing for Global Manufacturing
Most large and global manufacturers have implemented what could be described as ‘first generation’ e-Invoicing. This is a series of point solutions addressing electronic trading on a market-by-market or even a customer-by-customer basis. Given the complexity already involved in global e-Invoicing and the need for modern manufacturers to be fast, agile and resilient, the limitations of this approach are very clear.
The success of governments using e-Invoicing to tackle tax fraud and close the VAT gap will see the rapid growth of compulsory e-Invoicing mandates. E-Invoicing reduces operating costs and increases efficiency. With improved cashflow, better supplier relationships and global regulatory compliance, it’s easy to see why e-Invoicing really is the superhero of the business document world.
Learn more about how the E-Invoicing compliance solution from OpenText™ provides companies with a single, global enterprise e-Invoicing platform to facilitate trading with its community of partners and suppliers worldwide.
Among the turbulence and uncertainty created by the pandemic over the past 18 months there have been silver linings — unexpected, positive events that have taken place during this period of history.
Prior to March 2020, manufacturers were heads down, laser-focused on bringing differentiated products to market faster and better than competitors. Then, the forced shutdown put the future of operations in limbo, with supply chains halted and personnel sent home. Rather than continuing to operate in siloes, focused solely on their own survival, manufacturers came together as one, rallying around a common priority: organizational and employee safety.
Organizations typically competing for business joined forces to share best practices and resources to help each other get up and running safely and continue to evolve in a post-pandemic world. A common sentiment emerged: When we work together collectively, the industry is stronger as a result.
The power of safe-workplace playbooks
Just a few weeks after the pandemic hit we saw collaboration at its finest, with major manufacturing players making internal resources available to the masses. For example, automotive supplier Lear Corporation created a Safe Work Playbook, largely focused on health and safety procedures, operating disciplines and employee training. Recognizing that the outlined practices could help guide other organizations’ plans for resuming operations, Lear made the playbook downloadable, editable and free for other companies to use in the early days of the pandemic. A number of manufacturers have since followed suit.
Safe-workplace playbooks have emerged as go-to resources to promote a company-wide safety culture throughout disruption and post-disruption operations. Whether your organization has created its own playbook or taken advantage of open source, downloadable templates, the key is how you manage content to drive accountability, communications and compliance — regularly modifying, evolving and distributing information based on guidance from leading health organizations and internal stakeholders.
Renewed priority on digitization
While the pandemic slowed manufacturing operations, one movement gained speed: the adoption of digitization. According to McKinsey, the move was so rapid that consumer and business digital adoption vaulted five years forward in a matter of eight weeks. This transformation was led by an increase in cloud adoption to support remote working.
Building organizational resilience and adapting to global changes requires manufacturers to seize new digital capabilities. Making safe-workplace playbooks digital and mobile-first allows manufacturers to easily capture and update content, track usage to drive compliance and introduce new guidance when and where needed — demonstrating a corporate-wide commitment to employee safety.
Advance your operational health and safety
Based on a comprehensive enterprise content management (ECM) solution, Safe-Workplace Playbook Management for Manufacturers from OpenText™ helps companies gain a digital foundation to treat these playbooks as the critically important operating assets that they are.
Learn more about how well-managed safe-workplace playbooks can benefit your organization.
Late in 2019, the U.S. government introduced the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act to modernize grant reporting and free up time to focus more on measuring and managing grant programs. Today, nearly two years later, not much progress has been made — there are more grants and grantees, as well as higher costs and little improvement in grant performance or risk management. Grant makers and recipients are still looking for a better answer.
According to TAGGS, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has committed more than $1 trillion in grants and other financial assistance in 2021 already – compared with $750 billion for all federal government grants in fiscal year 2019. The driver behind this significant increase is COVID-19.
At a time when making sure every cent is well spent has never been so vital, two predictable things have happened. First, there’s been a spike in administrative costs, eating up as much as 15% of the value of federal government grants. Second, grant managers are struggling to measure performance. According to a survey by the National Grants Management Association (NGMA), more than 75% of respondents indicated that COVID-19 impacted grantee performance, with two-thirds of federal grant managers saying that impact is by more than 5%.
Complexity is the barrier to effective grant management
In theory, grants management is fairly straightforward. But in practice that’s not the case. There are multiple grants from each grant maker with their own specifications, reporting procedures and, often, grants management systems.
The challenge of identifying, applying, administering, reporting and closing out grants can be daunting for the grant recipient. This is especially true for smaller organizations that lack centralized grants teams or even a trained grants manager. To give one example of the difficulties, a survey from the Government Business Council found that only 10% of grant givers say that eligible grantees can always find available grants.
The situation is just as difficult for the grant maker. The reality of grants in government isn’t as simple as a one-way flow of money from central government. State and local government may be the primary grant makers, but they may also outsource to improve the flow of funds. A U.S. state may enlist a city administration to grant a local NGO, for example.
The grant maker still has to develop and award the grant, monitor performance and ensure that the goals are met. The goal of all granting agencies is to move from spending the bulk of their time ensuring technical compliance of the grantee to driving better performance and outcomes from the grant. Evidence suggests we’re not there yet. The NGMA research found that compliance remained the biggest focus of grant manager time and effort during COVID-19.
The need for grant lifecycle management
Managing grants is all about compiling and managing information at every stage in the ‘pre-award’ and `post award’ journey (See figure 1). For many organizations, managing grants relies on a mix of files, folders, e-mail and spreadsheetsto track status of filings, reviews and approvals and to manage and report on awards funds. They build up silos of information that negatively affect the cost and efficiency in administration and the overall performance of the grant.
This collection of disparate tools, decentralized activity and reliance on human initiative and follow through constrain the ability of the organization to effectively manage their grants program. There is no way to gain end-to-end visibility into the grant management process.
Grant managers want to be accountable and ensure they derive maximum value from the grant. That requires a grant lifecycle management solution that helps automate the process as well as the connections and collaboration between the grant maker and recipient. It means using a central platform that captures all grant data to facilitate performance improvement and effective reporting.
Grants Management for Public Sector from OpenText
Grants Management for Public Sector from OpenText™ is a comprehensive solution for efficient end-to-end grants management. It manages each grant from inception to closeout in a coordinated manner and is customized to address the unique requirements of each grant program.
The solution features a low-code platform that lets you create your grants lifecycle management quickly and cost-effectively using pre-defined and customizable templates. By enhancing your grant administration, performance management and risk management capabilities, the solution helps ensure not a cent is wasted.
Learn more about how Grants Management for Public Sector can help your organization.
With the release of OpenText™ Documentum™ CE 21.4, we’ve made improvements across the platform to enhance the user experience, improve system health, increase performance and collaboration, and provide enhanced security to make moving to the cloud an easy choice. Here’s an overview of what’s new in this release.
OpenText Documentum Platform
Design and manage workflows
The new web-based Workflow Designer provided with the Documentum Platform can be used for designing and managing D2 workflows. Current Documentum customers can migrate their workflows from Workflow Manager using the migration utility.
Securely control keys
More than ever, organizations face threats from bad actors attempting to access sensitive content. Now, with customer master encryption key management in this release, customers maintain secure control of all keys used to protect Documentum systems, content and secrets, even when hosted in third-party clouds. The master key envelopes the Application Encryption Key (AEK) that sits at the top of the Documentum encryption hierarchy. Pluggable integration to Cloud Key Management Services (KMS) and Cloud Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) provides remote encryption key management. By restricting access by user and role, this feature delivers extra protection and assurance that bad actors can’t get to sensitive content.
OpenText Documentum Connectors
Access current information
Documentum’s new integration with Salesforce® helps accelerate sales cycles by sharing content stored in Documentum directly from the Salesforce user interface. Users avoid miscommunication and improve the customer experience by always leveraging the most current Salesforce information. Organizations can rest assured their content will not be misused, since the content carries with it the enterprise security and compliance standards built into Documentum.
Work with content in context
Extended integration with Microsoft® 365 lets users work with Documentum content in context from within Microsoft 365 apps, including Excel and PowerPoint, reducing the need to move between applications.
Users can seamlessly checkout Documentum content from within Microsoft SharePoint Connector apps in SharePoint or Microsoft Teams, Documentum D2 or xCP. This simplifies and streamlines editing and delivers a more complete collaboration experience.
Collaboration Services for Teams has also been enhanced with collaboration features, including the ability to create a Teams site using content stored and governed in Documentum, and to check files back in to Documentum upon completion of the activity in Teams. This ensures documents are returned to the secure system of record where the required review and approval processes is completed automatically.
OpenText Documentum D2
This release includes features in Documentum D2 that enhance Smart View to work intuitively across more use cases.
Simplify access to lifecycle management
Smart View users can now apply lifecycle changes to a document in Smart View based on their user privileges. Business rules are consistently and automatically applied to documents as they progress through the various states of the document’s ‘life.’
View office documents
By leveraging the familiar viewing experience through the D2 viewer, OpenText™ Intelligent Viewer offers a cloud-first viewing technology with simplified deployment and operation for cloud, off-cloud and cloud native deployments. This delivers high-fidelity viewing across browsers for many office document formats including images and CAD, not just PDF renditions, and images like those created in the BravaCSR viewer.
Update en masse
Merger and acquisition activity and drug-status changes for Life Sciences companies are examples of use cases that often require mass updates to be made to documents, folders and virtual documents. To ensure these changes are made consistently and quickly, Documentum D2 updates properties on multiple objects in one action. This includes replacing attributes based on conditions of other fields.
Be cloud- and enterprise-ready
Documentum D2 includes enhanced cloud support to for administrators and improved user productivity. Some of the new cloud- and enterprise-readiness features include:
D2 installer support for iJMS deployments that improves D2 application performance
In-line login capabilities using iURL, which allows for administrator login without OTDS/SSP
Support for init container, versus the hook approach, for webapp customization that helps optimize resources
Integration of Documentum Reports with D2 Master HELM charts for easy deployment
Support for language packs that allow for customer-preferred languages to be used
OpenShift and Oracle Linux support
Operational IT management of Documentum container deployments
Kubernetes-based container support
Do more when mobile
Documentum D2’s new mobile capabilities include:
QR code scanning
Relations management, for creating and viewing relations
Document lifecycle management
Viewing and working on checked-out documents via tile landing pages and the hamburger menu of the mobile device
e-Signature support in key areas such as task processing, lifecycle, versioning, properties and non-credential IDP
Added security and compliance with e-Sign during task processing, lifecycle management and versioning or editing properties
Working/supporting files and task notes added directly by clicking on the add button in the app header
OpenText Documentum xCP Case Management
Easily create an attractive dashboard
Documentum’s xCP Case Management Framework assists in building Smart Applications. When designing and implementing a mortgage application process, for example, the new tiles and dashboard layout improve interaction and usability, provide better access to data and increase productivity with a modern interface and organized workspace.
Developers can easily create dashboards with the xCP Tile Layout Widget. Tiles provide interactive links to Data Services or any URL and can also link to common applicationfunctionality to create a dashboard menu that enhances the user experience.
Watch the on-demand presentations from OpenText World to learn more about enhancements across the Documentum family. View the entire OpenText World agenda here, and don’t miss session CTS207 that details what’s new and what’s next for OpenText Documentum.
Time to upgrade? In addition to the powerful new capabilities in 21.4, here are 10 more reasons to upgrade. Accelerate your upgrade and reduce risk by working with OpenText Professional Services. Let our experts work with you to assess your current environment and make recommendations for a successful upgrade to your cloud of choice.
Corporations are facing constant cybersecurity threats. They need to be able to respond by quickly and proactively conducting investigations that can identify a potential threat. Understanding how systems become compromised is paramount to protecting a corporation’s information, but typically the process to identify and investigate these threats requires expensive forensic and incident response services.
At OpenText™, we’re changing the paradigm on corporate investigations. As the leader in information management, OpenText is proud to announce that our 21.4 release includes the launch of EnCase Incident Response, which helps organizations identify threats sooner and get to the root-cause faster.
EnCase Incident Response delivers a comprehensive solution that provides threat identification, digital forensic and incident response capabilities. With EnCase Incident Response, organizations can save time and money by taking control of their incident response workflow.
As a bundled solution that combines EnCase threat detection and enterprise investigation capabilities, EnCase Incident Response provides comprehensive detection, response, remediation and full investigation capabilities with deep forensic visibility to uncover a full picture of how and why a compromise occurred. With EnCase Incident Response, enterprises can investigate insider or external threats across any device, anywhere. Based on OpenText digital forensic incident response and investigation underpinnings, EnCase Incident Response provides trusted, comprehensive visibility into target systems and enables Security Operations Center (SOC) teams to detect and respond to an incident with in-house tools, eliminating the need to engage expensive external resources to complete an investigation. And with seamless handoff from SOC Analysts and incident responders to advanced Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) Team, investigations happen faster, threats are identified more quickly and both procurement and maintenance costs are reduced.
For more information about EnCase Incident Response, visit our website at security.opentext.com.
The partnership between OpenText™ and Dassault Systemes is bringing connected engineering solutions to you like never before, built on Dassault’s CATIA computer-aided design products and supporting by OpenText’s cloud-based managed services.
CATIA 5 for everyone in applications tailored for anyone
As a designer, it’s important to have software that makes your job easier. Take 3DEXPERIENCE Electrical for instance – this is an industry-leading collaborative software which makes it easy for CATIA designers to design and develop complex electrical applications within existing projects. But the work of the designer is only one step in the process, and that work needs to be reviewed by other team members such as the project lead. What if the project lead doesn’t have access to CATIA or 3DEXPERIENCE? Does that mean the process stops, or there’s a workflow delay in converting files to something that outside users can see and comment on?
Not with CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE platforms. The importance of a streamlined workflow is paramount in product development, so CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE are built within an integrated platform which allows anyone to gain access to relevant data and files even if they are not using CATIA or 3DEXPERIENCE. This means that a project lead does not need to understand the ins-and-outs of the CATIA CAD software to do his or her job – all the relevant information is easily available with a first-class user experience and without any unnecessary components for that particular role. As a result, users across the entire workflow are ensured they’re getting the highest quality data and the most up-to-date designs in applications that are uniquely suited to the people using them.
A single source of truth
Connecting engineering is all about a “single source of truth.” Collaboration is ineffective when efforts are duplicated or information needs to be reinterpreted in each step – in fact, that’s not collaboration at all. That’s inefficient, silo-based working and it’s costing your company time and resources.
Truly collaborative engineering environments – including project data, sketches, and marketing specs – eliminate the silos and put everyone on the same page at the same time. The backbone of connected engineering is CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE, and OpenText’s cloud infrastructure means that collaborative environment is available anytime, anywhere, on any device.
Access the series of videos detailing this and other 3DEXPERIENCE journeys here.Learn more about Connected Engineering, the 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA portfolio and Dassault Systemes partnership with OpenText here.
