Carmen
Companies would like to avoid the use of paper and to keep everything on-line. It has their advantages such as efficiency, you do not spend hours to look for a particular document from client, vendor, etc. And of course environmental friendly. So the challenge here is "How to integrate the data from your business in one particular platform? " please take into account that we are taking about a massive corporation. So the challenge is global. The first thing to do is gather all business units across border and to agree in the lay out of the new platform that will integrate all the data. After that is important to create testing environments for all countries. And here it comes the biggest challenge. No everyone speaks ENGLISH. And even though there are plenty of tools to translate such a GOOGLE TRANSLATE and so on. The meaning of the words is not the same across countries specially when it comes to tax regulations. Therefore is important to gather and to make the platform useful for everyone globally. The final step after all integration is training, I would like to keep in mind this cannot be only considered before GO LIVE we should keep the train even after that. Why? because new update in the system, new colleagues, general questions and so on.
Hi Carmen,
Let me break down your challenge into several parts.
1. How to integrate data from different business systems in one platform?
Leaving all other aspects aside, that is fairly simple - through APIs and workflows you can push documents and data to a single document/records management system. We have seen cases where a particular organization uses 160 business systems and, although it is a challenge, there is a solution.
2. Agreement across business units
Although you can use a single system (repository), it does not mean that you cannot finetune the interface for different types of users (e.g. different classification, different filters, different document types). Every department or business unit could be viewed as a separate customer with a tailored solution in order to avoid compromises, which will lead to inefficiencies.
3. Languages
For sure it will be the most productive for local organizations to be able to have the documents in the local language. If, however, there is a need to have a document available in English, you can play with version controls and preserve the same document in multiple languages. Unfortunately, the system itself might not be the best translating solution and you will have to upload versions manually.
4. Training
Depending on agreements, it could be the responsibility of the service provider for delivery (including new releases) and designated roles within the organization for continuous training & new people onboarding.
5. Support
Totally depends on the SLA.