Ionuţ Arsene, Project Manager SIVADOC, within SIVECO Romania, speaks about the market of documents management solutions.

1. Where does the market of documents management solutions (DM) stand in times of crisis? What is happening to the demand? Are companies still interested in implementing such solutions? Which are the factors that have generated the current attitude of organizations and companies towards adopting DM solutions?

Ionuţ Arsene: The demand for software applications dedicated to efficient management is positively influenced by the current economic context, where the costs reductions represent the main objective of most of the companies.

The documents management solutions bring consistent benefits both to the companies operating with a significant volume of papers, and to the public institutions that want to increase the efficiency of their activity, helping them at the same time to provide better and faster services to citizens.

The experience of SIVECO Romania in implementing its own solution for management of documents, workflows, and electronic archive - SIVADOC supports these objectives. SIVADOC represents an investment with short term, as well as long term results, ensuring the reduction by at least 30% of the paper consumption, reduction by 45% of the time allocated by managers to documents and by 15% of the documents processing costs, along with other important advantages.

2. How would you define the evolution of SIVECO Romania business in the area of Document Management for the past 12 months? Which are the most recent projects developed by SIVECO Romania for the SIVADOC solution?

Ionuţ Arsene: The usefulness of electronic archiving services is well known among companies, even if a part of these still continue to use traditional methods for storing information. Mostly in the public administration, working with physical documents is overwhelming.

Over the past 12 months, our company has implemented or is currently implementing the SIVADOC solution at 4 (four) new internal beneficiaries - both public and private institutions - that were dealing with a large volume of documents and needed streamlining the activity and, by default, increasing efficiency of their expenses. In the context of optimizing the working processes of an institution, SIVADOC can function both as an independent system for the management of documents, workflows and electronic archives, as well as natively integrated with the information package SIVECO Applications 2011 and the solution for managerial analysis SIVECO Business Analyzer.

3. What type of companies (large, SMEs) still generate demand in the DM area and to which economy sectors do they belong?

Ionuţ Arsene: It is especially the case of organizations that deal with a large volume of documents, both from the public and private sector. Special interest is shown by the public institutions - city halls, county councils, prefectures, national agencies, but also by companies from sectors such as Production, Utilities, and Distribution and from the Banking sector.

4. Which are the features of the SIVADOC solution?

Ionuţ Arsene: The application for management of documents, workflows and electronic archives SIVADOC from SIVECO Romania has as main goal streamlining and automation of the documents flow, irrespective of their format and support.

SIVADOC solves the critical problems of organizations: electronic archiving, workflows, respecting deadlines, documents search and retrieval, security and collaborative work with documents.

By means of SIVADOC, all information are accessible directly from the information system, providing also facilities for integrating information under the form of reports in text or graphical format (pie-charts, bar or point graphs, etc.). Implementing SIVADOC at the level of the organization will lead to increasing the quality of documents processing, to a reduction of the physical documents archive and of their storage space.

SIVADOC operates on any of the well known database management systems (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or PostGresSQL). Also for links related to flexibility, SIVADOC has been designed such as to be able to operate both on the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Linux environment.

For the documents in printed format the solution provides the mechanisms for scanning and retrieving information of OCR type (Optical Character Recognition), while for the documents entering in electronic format are used mechanisms for integration with the systems of electronic messaging, of fax messages management, as well as facilities of automatic upload of the documents saved in certain directories. Also, it ensures integration with the Microsoft Office applications and integration into Microsoft Windows work environment.

5. Which are the main benefits brought to companies by the adoption of SIVADOC solution (from the feed-back received by SIVADOC from them)?

Ionuţ Arsene: SIVADOC, the documents management solution of SIVECO Romania, ensures important advantages to companies:

• Allows centralizing and making available to the entire organization of all the documents, irrespective of their entry mode into the system or of their nature (text documents, electronic messages, faxes, scanned documents, images);
• Represents a flexible manner for organizing the organization's documents on a tree-like structure, similar to a standard files system - drawers, files and documents;
• Generates the documents in standardized formats;
• Adapts the simple search or advanced search mechanisms to any level of knowledge in computer use, as well as to the needs to perform filtering based on criteria of various complexities;
• Allows secured access to any level of the documents repository, either this is a drawer, a file or a document;
• Ensures the reduction of the storage space by translating documents from the archive sector into electronic format;
• Maintains in safety the archive documents without the risk of their damage;
• Reflects in a truthful manner, through its management facilities, the mode of organization and the developed activity, ensuring the protection of information both within the organization, as well an outside it;
• Accelerates and increases the efficiency of organizational processes;
• Improves the quality of information processing in the organization;
• Improves the organization's image by using of standardized documents, by treating similar topics through well established flows and compliance with rules;
• Through the possibility of using electronically signed documents, electronic documents are given the same legal value to the ones in hard copy.

Among the quantifiable benefits, we should mention the following:

• Reduction by at least 30% of the paper consumption as a result of the circulation and storage of documents in electronic format between departments or to/from external partners.
• Reduction by 45% of the time allocated by managers for processing documents
• Reduction by 15% of the costs with printing documents, and adjoining activities (procurement and management of the consumables needed for printing).

6. The public area is a special one as regards DM. What is missing in order to become one of the most important pillars of the area for documents management solutions? What can you tell us on what happened already in the public sector as regards the adoption of DM solutions? Where does Romania stand in this respect?

Ionuţ Arsene: The public area managing an impressive number of documents has a huge need for such IT based solutions that can dramatically change the activity, for the good.

There is an immense opportunity for developing projects for the local and central administration, to be funded from structural funds.

Our company has implemented the system for management of documents, workflows, and electronic archive - SIVADOC in numerous institutions, such as STX RO Offshore Tulcea (former company AKER Tulcea), Lower Danube University in Galati, Constantin Brâncuşi University in Târgu-Jiu, CONGAZ Constanţa, Bucharest Municipality City Hall.

For the implementation carried out at AKER Tulcea, SIVECO Romania has received in 2010 the Finalist title at European IT Excellence Awards 2010, in the Solution Provider category.

The benefits recorded by our customers are significant. For example, at Bucharest City Hall (PMB), there were the following advantages:

• Improvement of productivity in documents processing and massive costs reduction through minimizing the times necessary for documents' retrieval or recreation;
• Facilitating decision making process by making available relevant information to the persons requesting them, whenever necessary;
• Improvement of employees' collaboration through supplying of tools for common data access;
• Defining the workflows for PMB, thus being ensured the traceability of the documents' path and being able to measure the efficiency of communication and processing flows;
• Improving security through control of access to information.

Implementation of the System for documents management, SIVADOC, has lead to identifying the possibilities of increasing efficiency in the communication flows and triggering proposals for changing the current mode of activities development in certain areas.