Guest Column: Out-Of-The-Box Integration

By Andrew Bailey

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how it is possible for small and medium-sized firms (SMB's) to achieve levels of application integration historically reserved for large enterprises with deep IT pockets. Specifically, how an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) can be integrated with other core business applications to drive efficiency and manage IT costs.

One of the bigger problems small enterprises face is the need to enter the same data more than once to satisfy the requirements of different software applications such as a customer relationship management system (CRM) or an accounting software package. Frequently these applications do not communicate data with each other. As a result, data is entered twice, increasing possibility of data entry error. Another significant problem is learning new software applications. Most small enterprises find it difficult to spare employee time to learn new software applications. CNG has developed two modules, Synchronizer and Retriever, which address both of these problems and provide the advantages of using an EDMS. In addition, Synchronizer and Retriever reduce the amount of time necessary to integrate software applications from weeks to less than a day. By solving these three problems, Synchronizer and Retriever make the investment in a document management solution easy to justify versus deploying a non-integrated document management solution.