The new platform economy

Platforms are essential for managing information and business processes in all areas of a company. They are opening up to the outside world by no longer just controlling and planning resources, but also managing information in the context of processes and projects and including any networks in this.

Ecosystem can suddenly topple

The corporate ecosystem has to be able to withstand a lot, otherwise it could suddenly topple over. Changes are urgently needed to shape the digital transformation.

Analog information and media are absolutely taboo in a digital world! They cannot keep up with the required speed and dynamics. Fragmented software landscapes with information silos and media discontinuities are also on the brink of extinction. There is no longer an alternative to the digital!

With the transformation of economic ecosystems, classic linear value chains are losing importance. Agile and dynamic networks are taking their place. The management of information relationships is increasingly becoming the focus of digital platforms. This means that limitations in terms of scaling, integration and dynamics must be overcome and complexity reduced.

This initially increases the pressure on enterprise IT. Because the enterprise ecosystem is opening up. New constellations are emerging all the time, and they have to be integrated flexibly.

In meeting these challenges, digital platforms such as those from SAP and SER handle the workload of digital business models quickly, efficiently and productively in the background.

The platform potential is becoming increasingly important: Information must be used profitably. The more value creation is digitized, the more economic significance scalable and agile enterprise content management platforms (ECM) such as Doxis4 have in companies, through which the information of value creation and business relationships are managed.

ECM has what it takes to become the central information platform within the platform economy. ECM also complements the SAP transaction platform wherever and whenever document-based processes and the documentation of business processes are required. The latter is almost always the case for compliance reasons, from audit-proof archiving to the EU-DSGVO.

Biodiversity takes its toll on ecosystems

It is not the complexity, but the diversity of species and redundancies in the software application landscape that are currently still the greatest challenge. In general, enterprise IT finds it difficult to solve complex challenges with diverse software systems because it often underestimates the complex interactions and diverse structures of the various applications.

Historic fragmentation, company acquisitions, and a best-of-breed strategy have led to ever-increasing interdependency among applications.

Mastering scaling and interactions has put shackles on IT and led to a neglect of customer experience and usability, which is felt by users and customers.

Focusing on a few software platforms is still the most promising way to stay ahead of important innovation fields.

SAP is an open ecosystem that executes, controls and analyzes transactions of structured data quickly and efficiently. But not all digital challenges and requirements can be solved with SAP alone.

For the physical storage, archiving and structuring of documents, for example, an SAP-certified ECM such as Doxis4 from SER is required. Both systems, SAP and ECM, are like Yin & Yang. One needs the other!

ECM out of the shadows

The digital business transformation has allowed ECM to step out of SAP's shadow. The importance and necessity of this enterprise-wide digitization platform is undisputed today. Unlike in the past, the customer experience is the focus of ECM.

The customer experience now includes customers, employees and business partners. From the first inquiry to after-sales service, ECM delivers documents and data along the value chain, which is particularly significant in communication and documentation (keyword: compliance).

So if you see digitization and networking as changing the entire value chain and company-customer relationship, this networking will create entirely new communication and service opportunities that will increase the company's own share of value creation.

In sales, in service, in a call center, in addition to customer data, employees need direct and easy access to all necessary customer documents such as orders, invoices, correspondence, preferably systematically structured as we know it from analog files.

The speed of the digital world no longer allows for limited access to information. Leaving questions unanswered or even having the time to find the information by sequentially opening different applications is considered poor service and is penalized by the customer.

Collaboration in the digital ecosystem

In a digital ecosystem of this kind, companies collaborate digitally with partners all over the world, whether next door or on the other side of the world. The Westfalen Group's business and private customers are integrated as digital partners via a portal.

Here, customers actively access their order and delivery data, invoices, credit notes, certificates, product data sheets, etc. in equal measure. SER's Doxis4 ECM in the background guarantees that all information in the customer portal is always up-to-date and, above all, stored securely:

If, for example, employees revise product data sheets or documents relating to orders, etc., these are available online in the portal for the respective customer at the same time - without duplicate data maintenance or manual sorting.

Economies of scale through pre-installations

The economies of scale of this new platform economy are achieved by the fact that services and solutions are virtually pre-installed on the basis of a platform and only need to be expanded or adapted for other company and task areas.

The ECM platform is a technological basis surrounded by a construction kit. In analogy to SAP, ECM with Doxis4 offers an open, digital platform that enables companies to have an extraordinary variety of applications and builds a bridge to customers, suppliers and business partners.

This means that ECM technology can be easily expanded to include platform-specific services and functions. This results in lower costs and IT efforts as well as short implementation times.

IT can concentrate entirely on the specific customer experience of the ECM applications. The point here is not to lump everything together. Rather, the identical functional core of document-based ECM applications is often not immediately recognizable.

From a contract file to a personnel file, there are a variety of functions that are identical, such as filing and archiving documents, versioning, or searching for documents.

The structure of a contract file is of course different from that of a personnel file, but the general structuring options are the same. Whether I'm checking an invoice or contracts, for example, the functions required, such as the dual control principle, resubmissions and sequential, parallel or independent processing, are the same.

These ECM templates can be implemented more quickly in solutions. IT and business units thus find each other more easily and quickly. This enables new processes with unprecedented flexibility. Once implemented, the applications can be used virtually anywhere in the world in the respective national language.

Keeping the Big Picture in Mind

All company and task areas, from development to accounting to service, can benefit from this ECM platform without having to build parts of it themselves. Only the area- and task-specific customizing is required.

Such a blueprint requires a big picture when planning digitization with an ECM. The new value proposition should be at the top of this target picture.

Here we come full circle: the success of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple & Co. is based not least on the fact that they have placed the value proposition at the center of their big picture.