Structured/unstructured content (ERP/ECM)

Today, most companies and government agencies have invested in specialized enterprise software - such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or supply chain management (SCM) - to standardize their core business processes, such as customer relationship management, asset accounting, accounting, payroll, supply chain management, and, and, and.

These applications are ideal for managing highly structured transaction data and information such as addresses, articles, customer numbers, personnel numbers or order numbers, which uniquely identify a business process.

However, these specialized applications ignore the fact that many processes are triggered by, associated with, or may even generate unstructured content. Such content includes emails, technical documentation, chat histories, contracts, photos, resumes, certificates, product data sheets, and more.

As a result, many companies and institutions have adopted enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to coordinate and control this same unstructured content. ECM helps users create, collaborate, share, store, retrieve, archive, and ultimately destroy content through a variety of functions.

Does ECM as a silo application really help me now? Only to a limited extent, because it is not uncommon for the worlds of structured business processes and unstructured content to still coexist separately. Companies and institutions of all sizes now see this as a serious source of problems.

In almost every customer- or partner-facing process, extensive unstructured documents are exchanged. At the time a document arrives or is created, the author and the recipient are still very familiar with the context and meaning (relation).

But the memory soon fades and the information, some of which was still stored more or less indiscriminately on desks, shared hard drives or in isolated computer programs or "dark archives", is de facto lost to the company.

Even if someone remembers their existence and where they were filed, there is virtually no information left to recall the content in the original context of the business process. Employees thus waste valuable time researching the context in which the document was relevant or no longer relevant. Missing or incorrectly assigned information can also become a legal risk.

Analysts estimate that around 90 percent of all information is in unstructured form - and the volume is rising sharply. Nevertheless, unstructured information continues to elude systematic processing in companies.

The lack of integration in the context of leading applications, such as SAP, Successfactors, Sales-force or Microsoft Office365, creates further isolated content repositories (storage locations). The outdated n:1 asset linking only helps to a very limited extent here. 

An ingenious concept provides a remedy

So let's just use the concept of database modeling as a template and "throw" the identical document types into a common "virtual pot" - of course provided with some important meta fields.

Then we intelligently and flexibly model the linking rules, bring them to the structured data of the leading application and voilà ... the corresponding digital workspace of structured and unstructured content is created for each business process as if by magic.

What is Extended ECM and how does it work?

Extended ECM is based on the business objects of the leading applications that map and control the business processes in the company. For each of the business object types, a template of the digital workspace is created with the corresponding folder structure and the templates contained therein (e.g. Word, Excel, etc.).
templates, PDF attachments, etc.) are defined and assigned.

This creates a digital "content twin" that is automatically created and linked each time a customer master data record is created, for example. Extended ECM now enriches this "content twin" with unstructured data from e-mails, the inbox or other applications such as CAD systems. This creates a central place where all document and information flows come together and are centrally accessible - no matter from where in the world they are accessed via web browser. 

Decades of development partnership between SAP and OpenText

It is little known that the two companies can look back on a 25-year development partnership. Thus, the integration is not only very well thought-out, but especially future-proof ... if a new release of SAP is ready, the partner solution is already available in a short time.

This is also reflected in the SAP Pinnacle Awards. For the twelfth year in a row, OpenText was presented with the Solu-tion Extension Award. SAP presents these awards to top partners who distinguish themselves through a close partnership with SAP and support their customers in working more effectively with SAP products. However, very few SAP customers are aware that these solutions can also be obtained "from a single source" directly from SAP or a partner such as iXenso AG. 

To meet the challenges on the road to digital transformation, we talk to our customers not about individual products, but about a platform strategy for technology consolidation. After all, the shortage of technology specialists is likely to get worse rather than better in the coming years.

This can be countered, among other things, with a consistent cloud strategy, provided this is compatible with European data protection law and disproportionate access by foreign investigative authorities is prevented (including the USA PATRIOT Act).

ECM Cloud "runs at Germany

Since last year, iXenso AG's sister company, iXenso CS GmbH, has also been providing these ECM services from the cloud via an SAP PMC (Partner Managed Cloud) contract and its long-standing partner Telekom, and linking these services to the customer systems, regardless of whether it is a pure archive, OCR, output management or even Extended ECM.

One of the largest customers is -powercloud GmbH, a market-leading cloud service provider in the energy sector. In this cloud environment, the xECM Enabler developed by iXenso AG for SAP Business ByDesign customers. By means of standardized processes SAP Business ByDesign ECM services and digital workspaces.

iXenso Group

The iXenso Group is a digitization expert & reseller for Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Resource Planning. The international group of companies has been successfully implementing solutions to optimize business processes based on SAP and OpenText technologies for more than two decades.

The team handles the entire project, from license provision and implementation to support. The head office is in Freiburg im Breisgau, with locations in Munich, Hanover and Turin (IT). From practice for practice: The group is almost completely "digitally on the go" and, as a result of the digital transformation, has also implemented the organizational structure and processes in a flexible and agile manner. For this, iXenso AG was awarded the "Digital Champion Award" by Wirtschaftswoche, among others.