“There are three predictable barriers to business growth: leadership and management, market dynamics, and systems and structure.”

Digitech Systems offers a comprehensive Enterprise Content Management (ECM) product suite that enables businesses to more effectively manage information of any kind—from paper documents and electronic files to print streams, forms and even email. Choose an on premise system or move your ECM to the cloud and get access to any document, anywhere, anytime on virtually any device.

BusinessInterviews.com: How can ECM help a business that is overwhelmed by their current information management system?

Sean: Interestingly enough, a lot of businesses out there today still do not have information management systems in place. They have disparate systems and line of business applications, and they are fielding tons of information coming at them from multiple sources, in multiple formats and file types. ECM software is the collector and the repository for all of that information. The biggest savings for businesses come when they begin having everything in an electronic format—less paper, less boxes, less filing cabinets, and the benefits that come from improved access to the information. Gaining access to it faster and easier makes them more efficient, and able to be more proactive rather than reactive. Most of our customers get the strongest return on investment by eliminating the space and square footage that is required to manage paper and older formats of data.

BusinessInterviews.com: How do you help managing information go from an overhead expense to a generator of substantial savings and potentially new revenue?

Sean: All Island Gastroenterology & Liver Associates (AIG) is an example of a small healthcare practice that implemented ImageSilo from Digitech Systems and measured huge productivity and financial gains. With over 15,000 patients, AIG’s cabinets and boxes of patient charts were taking over the office, and they didn’t have the physical space to incorporate a new physician. Even with their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, they couldn’t manage everything electronically, and laborious searches for paper patient records siphoned productivity from the office. After integrating an ECM solution alongside their HER, they saw the system almost immediately move from an overhead expense to a generator of substantial savings and new revenue. Analysts from Nucleus Research measured the quantifiable impact on the bottom line of their business to be:

• 879% ROI and project payback in 1.3 months
• Gained 4,000 hours each year in staff productivity—worth $100,000 annually
• Efficiency increases enabled doctors to see 25 more patients each week
• Avoided hiring a part-time employee, saving $25,000 annually
• Removed filing cabinets and cleared storage rooms to make space for a new doctor
• Increased revenue 50% by adding a doctor to the practice
• Saved at least $35,000 by outsourcing paper scanning and indexing services
• Annual benefit of $435, 687

In addition to these types of directly measurable gains, I think another powerful benefit that leads to savings in general is moving your company and your teams from a reactive to a proactive state. I personally believe that even in this day and age, there are a lot of businesses that think they have an information management system, but they only have bits and pieces.

People believe in the age of the iPhone and tablets—that every business out there has an information management system in place to handle all of the information being exchanged, yet that is not the reality we see. We still see people with paper and with disparate systems, and there is a lot of overhead in those processes. There is a lot of overhead in maintaining control of that information. It requires more staff to manage. Things are much slower, arduous and time consuming, and from a business perspective, your business is living in a reactive state.

There are three predictable barriers to business growth: leadership and management, market dynamics, and systems and structure. This is where the business needs to excel in order to grow.

Yet, systems and structure in small to medium-sized businesses are still lagging behind. They think they have an information management system in place because in finance they have a great accounting package to manage some financial aspect of the business, and perhaps over in sales they have a great CRM tool. They have information about their customers that can be used to solve customer problems, yet the information lives in two disparate systems that cannot be combined to improve customer service and increase their speed of doing business. Most businesses today are receiving a lot of emails with invoices or getting requests or service tickets through multiple channels. When these components come in, they are often printed out and then go into a filing cabinet, not in either one of those two systems. So now, an archaic third system has been created that requires management overhead.

This is where Digitech Systems comes in. We don’t care how the information comes in. We’re able to collect it and help the organization organize it appropriately. We can get the right information in front of the right people that need to make decisions to solve a customer’s problem, to enhance customer support, to make the sale, to work with all their customers more effectively and quickly.

BusinessInterviews.com: What’s one marketing strategy that’s worked well for you?

Sean: Our industry tends to make this a technology sale, making it overly complex using acronyms and terms that don’t resonate with the customer. What does resonate with them is how we are going to impact their checkbook and their bottom line.
At Digitech Systems, our marketing team has worked with analyst firms to develop case studies that focus on what’s important to the customer, which is their return on investment. When businesses see how much they can save, benefit and improve their business, the right decision is much easier to make. Nucleus Research has measured ROI for Digitech Systems users for a number of years, and the impact of numbers like this on a company are staggering. For example:

• All Island Gastroenterology had an ROI of 879% with payback in 1.3 months and an average annual benefit of $435,687
• The Mental Health Center of Denver had an ROI of 1315% with a six week payback and an average annual benefit of $259,625
• Bigelow Tea replaced its paper-based content storage system and deployed our cloud solution ImageSilo in their Accounts Payable department. From that one implementation alone, they saw an 813% ROI with payback in 2 months, and have since deployed the system company wide.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some trends in your industry that you’re excited about or think that our readers should be paying attention to?

Sean: In the cloud, security is one of the most important things people should think about. We are monomaniacal when it comes to security, and we have to be. Think about all of the press you see with some of the bigger organizations that have data breeches, and then imagine all the little guys that are turning to cloud and the potential for the release of their information. Digitech Systems brings to the table seven different layers of security. We protect information before it can be released through our security application. We protect information from access as it sits at rest. It’s very intuitive and easy to use. Easy for the small to medium-sized business to set their own rules with how they want to protect data and prevent those types of breeches. That’s key, because we don’t see that a lot of the cloud providers out there are as focused on security, which poses a risk to the customer.

BusinessInterviews.com: Your cloud-based ECM service, ImageSilo, went to market in 1999, and since that time, you’ve maintained 99.995% uptime—a feat unrivaled in any industry. How have you managed to keep the momentum going at such an impressive rate for so long?

Sean: We truly have really great people behind the scenes that work night and day to make Digitech Systems’ uptime and customer service second to none. First, I’d like to say to achieve that solid of an uptime, it’s all about how you design and implement the system. A software company doesn’t wake up one day and say, “Hey! The cloud is big, so I’m going to park my software there.” There are a lot of things you have to do to deliver a solid cloud platform. Security and reliability are the two main cornerstones. Businesses trust us with their information. That means they need access to it 99.9% of the time and we have been able to deliver that for more than a decade because of our architecture and people.

I believe at the end of the day, as technology in specific industries becomes more of a commodity, the way you are going to win as an organization is to provide incredible, legendary customer service. We have done that for years, and our customers are loyal because we serve them so well and consistently save them so much money.

BusinessInterviews.com: What’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for you personally or professionally?

Sean: I’m excited to see where Digitech Systems is headed as an organization. I remember the day that I first had an opportunity to look at the technology and get a feel for who Digitech Systems is. I was extremely impressed with the technology. As I dug a little deeper, I got to understand the organization and the people and the goals for growing the company and growing the people in it. I was even more impressed. That hasn’t changed for me in the 11 years I’ve been with the organization. We are growing. We are hiring. We are grooming and growing our team while building great new innovative technologies. I’m beyond excited about the future of our organization because of all these things.