Deciding upon an EDMS Cloud Infrastructure as a primary technology strategy has been growing in popularity in recent years, even in the conservative domain of Engineering Document Management and Collaboration on construction projects.
The attraction and promise of the myriad of benefits to businesses appear to have been fully reconciled against the past sensitivity to perceived risks. Most now accept that they should move their business to the cloud.
The Move to an EDMS Cloud Infrastructure
How To Make It Pay Off
There are 3 main business drivers you need to consider when moving to the cloud.
- Quality of service
- Cost of service
- Business process support and automation of service
There could be good reasons why you should not move everything to the cloud just yet. What you need is a smart strategy for how and when to make a move.
When it comes to quality of service, one of the benefits is that you can leave the job of hosting and managing applications to a provider that has this as their core business. For this to be a true benefit, the cloud provider must be proven to be better at hosting than your existing service.
The rationale for the cost of service is that the cloud provider has a lower cost base through economy of scale. Clients must take care that contract costs to scale and details of SLA inclusions or exclusions don’t include hidden costs.
Lastly, there is business process support and automation of service, or in other words: how the solution is helping people do their jobs.
On-premise, software often has the benefit of having matured over a long period of time, with the perception of being more customizable than cloud products. Legacy installations of Engineering Document Management workflows are a good example of this scenario.
For the move to the cloud to pay off, a combination of these three drivers (quality, cost, business process support) needs to sum up to a compelling business case. Depending on the complexity of your business you must decide how to proceed and the speed that you move.
When to Make It Pay Off
With low complexity, you might make the transition quicker and in fewer steps, whereas more complexity might require the move to be gradual, starting with high impact areas and products.
When developing a business case for the cloud, quality and cost are the easiest parameters to calculate return on investment, while business process support is more difficult.
A final question we suggest you ask is: “What can the cloud do to help people do their jobs, that on-premise software cannot”?
The answer should help you determine if the move is urgent or if you can delay till later or perhaps there is a 3rd option namely a hybrid solution of cloud and on-premise.
Why to Make It Pay Off
Proarc Engineering Document Management Solutions (EDMS) helps clients manage their engineering documentation.
Collaboration typically involves multiple parties dispersed around the globe, where 100’s of suppliers collaborate with major contractors. Proarc’s cloud infrastructure excels in applications where more than 50.000 business critical documents and drawings are controlled. Specialty documentation areas relate to engineering, fabrication, construction and commissioning of large industrial facilities or infrastructure projects have unique characteristics that make Proarc the best EDMS software available.
With a significant quantity of documents flowing back and forth internally as well as externally with suppliers, contractors and ultimately clients. Customers state that this external collaboration is the area that users spend the most time, struggling with manual and tedious operations to get things done.
This is handled through email, FTP servers, file sync and share solutions or giving external users direct access to on-premise software. These solutions are either expensive, require certain competence, or have many manual operations for users, or all the above.
Also, the user experience for external users is typically disappointing or frustrating regarding performance, usability or support.
Choosing Your EDMS Cloud Infrastructure Strategy
Pure Cloud or Hybrid Solutions?
With a pure cloud or cloud hybrid set up, this is different.
You can remove the complex infrastructure and reduce the time of manual operations associated with external user collaboration. A good place to start your cloud transition is with solutions for external collaboration.
If you choose a pure cloud solution, you get benefits of reduced cost and complexity, together with much easier collaboration with external users. You also get frequent updates, no large-scale service packs, and typically higher levels of satisfaction with the user experience.
If you choose a hybrid solution using the cloud for external collaboration, you still get the benefits of improved business process support, plus you don’t have to trade the rich on-premise functionality for a new product with fewer features than your current solution.
The other advantage is that you can make the full transition when the cloud products offer feature/value parity with the on-premise software.
The Next Step in Cloud Strategy for EDMS…
To decide the best option for your unique situation, simply hit the button below so we can schedule a time to discuss the cloud capabilities available to address your specific Information management and control challenges!
