Business process management, document management and enterprise portals are all examples of applications, which harness the power of the Internet to improve efficiency or cut business costs. If your organization is currently struggling with a sea of paperwork, or you are being bombarded with the same old repetitive questions from customers, it could be time to investigate one or more of the following solutions.

Business Process Management
BPM tools can help you identify and eliminate process bottlenecks, or manage complex tasks more efficiently, especially when they involve the collaboration of multiple staff.

Document Management
At its simplest level document management solutions involve scanning paper-based records into electronic form as part of an online retrieval system. The main advantages include space saving and security benefits as the original documents can be stored off-site, and efficiency benefits as documents can be accessed by multiple staff from any location.

Enterprise Portals
Portals use the web or web-like protocols to publish and or gather information. The term ‘portal’ has been used to described relatively simple intranets or extranets. In their most advanced form a portal can pull together data from one or more enterprise applications as well as web content, to give staff a task- related ‘view’ of the organization, which may be accessed with a single sign-on.

BPM
Business Process Management (BPM) System is a new generation tool, which allows organizations to IT enable their business processes so that they can reduce process costs, improve productivity & efficiency, establish customized business relationships, and improve customer satisfaction. Typically a true BPM system consists of:

Process Definition tool Workflow execution engine Business Rules engine Application Integration & B2B integration framework Process Monitoring & Control component Process Data Query and Analysis tool, and Performance Measurement tool

We have expertise in delivering BPM solutions utilizing the following tools

Document Management
The facts from Gartner

• Over 60% of all companies still process, store and retrieve documents manually.
• 80% to 95% of enterprise information is located within paper and electronic documents.
• 25% of enterprise documents are misplaced and will never be located.
• 30% of Gartner Group clients store more than 50% of their documents on local hard drives or floppy disks.

What’s wrong with Paper?

• It’s relatively expensive
• It’s dumb: data cannot be ‘mined’ or searched for business intelligence.
• It’s slow: you print it, post it, someone opens it, routes to someone else that pushes it around a desk for a week and finally decides to process, file or bin it.
• It’s inefficient: normally its contents require re-keying and those who need it can’t easily find and share it.
• It creates business process bottlenecks – a key business growth inhibitor

Gartner concludes that document mismanagement claims:

• 40% to 60% of office workers’ time
• 20% to 45% of labor costs
• 12% to 15% of corporate revenue

As recently as 10 years ago most businesses’ important documentation was printed out, photocopied and filed away. Letters to supply chain partners, quotations, latest price lists – everything was filed and could be found again easily enough should circumstances demand it.

Today however, around 60 percent of a businesses’ corporate knowledge is stored on the personal hard drives of its employees – and the bulk of that is actually in their emails – known only to them and purged every six months or so when the IT managers start running low on storage space.

This scenario, the ‘cultural’ aspect of staff storing information on personal hard drives and within emails, has crept up unnoticed on most businesses. The situation is serious, but the good news is it can be addressed.

So how do you get your organization’s documents and document processes under control? SYNFOSYS offer consultation and approach the following ways to deliver an effective documentation and tracking:

Phase 1: Investigation and discovery
Phase 2: Evaluate what it’s worth
Phase 3: Scope out a solution
Phase 4: Implementation

Enterprise Portals
What is a Portal and Why You May Need One because time is money. Today, people expect and need to be able to find information and make decisions within minutes instead of weeks or months. In its simplest form, a portal provides a single interface for a user that needs access to a decentralized, diverse set of IT resources.

Just as a corporate Internet presence requires a starting point, a place where you can jump off to all the various resources and services on offering so the intranet and Extranet require a common location or portal from which navigation can begin.

Business Portal: A portal may also bring together business interests within certain industry areas to create critical mass for their particular goods and services. For the medium to large organization though the portal is often the best way to provide common access to resources useful for staff and partner companies.

Corporate Portal: The Enterprise or Corporate Information Portal (EIP or CIP for short) is typically the gateway to electronic information held by an enterprise and the core location to access and interact with the associated applications. This may be available only to the enterprise in the case of an intranet or to business partners and selected customers outside of the organizational walls in the case of the extranet.

The EIP is designed to help release the competitive potential lying dormant in enterprise systems by integrating applications that combine, standardize, index, analyze and distribute targeted, relevant information so end users can do their jobs more efficiently and productively.

Benefits of having a Portal:
A single gateway to essential information and applications for internal or external users.
One-stop access to application functionality and services completes the portal picture, bringing together everything employees; partners and customers need in a single, highly efficient environment.

There are several degrees to which companies can utilize portals, ranging from sophisticated Intranets to fully-fledged architecture facilitating content management and collaboration across all applications and data sources associated with a business process.

• A central point to view on-line catalogues and competitive information
• A location where orders can be placed and processed
• A focus for to simplify and integrate processes and procedures that would normally require paperwork or research in multiple areas
• A way to reduce cost, increase sales and create efficiencies in the supply chain

Types of Portals
By dividing users into groups and identifying their primary functions, portals can be categorized in the following ways:

• External Portals (Customer Self-Service (customers))
• Extranets (customers, partners, employees)
• Internal Portals Employee Portal (all employees)
• Knowledge Worker Portals (a portal aimed at a particular role)

SYNFOSYS Consultants have worked extensively on the following Portal Servers: