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    SharePoint as a Content Management System: The Amazing Outcome

    Find a better way to process essential business documents when you use SharePoint as an ECM system. That’s what MJB Wood Group did with the SharePoint they had already invested in. Wanting to take some of their key business processes such as payroll requests, payments to vendors, and legal documents to the next level, they deployed KnowledgeLake on top of Microsoft SharePoint. This enabled them to create an efficient, fast system for document management. The solution even included integration with a portal that enabled them to share documents outside of the company’s network.

    → Read: The Complete Guide to SharePoint Modernization

    MJB Wood Group’s Challenge

    Starting as a small, local wood products supplier in Texas in 1975, MJB Wood experienced rapid growth throughout the years. Today, they are a major international distributor of wood products with 200 employees, 13 sales offices, a large manufacturing facility and hundreds of partners. All-in-all, their business is killing it.

    But, like any company that sees quick growth and expansion, their processes and procedures often lag behind. While maintaining their efforts to keep their systems up-to-date, they soon realized another bi-product of their rapid expansion was mountains and mountains of paper.

    “The sheer volume of paper we dealt with was affecting essential business processes, such as accounts payable, payroll and legal. We had to find a better solution for dealing with essential documents.”

    – Rama Sundaram, Director of Technology for MJB Wood Group.

    The KnowledgeLake Solution

    MJB Wood Group was ready to begin using their SharePoint as an ECM system. But to be successful, their solution needed to streamline key processes, such as AP payment processing, while eliminating the need to store boxes of paper, as well as provide electronic indexing and visibility to documents across the business.

    And that’s where KnowledgeLake came in.

    “Since we had already installed SharePoint, we felt strongly that KnowledgeLake would not only deliver the functionality we wanted, but would also integrate seamlessly with SharePoint to leverage existing technology.”

    – Rama Sundaram, Director of Technology for MJB Wood Group.

    How SharePoint became MJB Wood Group’s dream ECM system

    The initial KnowledgeLake deployment went smoothly and took about three months to roll out to several departments. This included accounting, production, payroll, finance and legal.

    With a mix of hardware and software technology used to create SharePoint as an ECM system, documents were scanned into the system using MJB Wood Group’s scanners. Then, using KnowledgeLake technology, each document was tagged with metadata, enabling efficient and streamlined search and retrieval within SharePoint.

    Additionally, KnowledgeLake provided MJB with “train the trainer” sessions, which allowed key project stakeholders to get other employees and users up to speed quickly on the technology.

    The Benefits of Using SharePoint as an ECM System

    With their KnowledgeLake ECM solution up and running, MJB Wood quickly realized the benefits of having their business processes streamlined. Information was accessed more quickly, creating numerous efficiencies in business processes that mitigated the after-effects of rapid expansion and enabled them to be more agile during their time of tremendous growth.

    Still using SharePoint as an ECM system today, MJB Wood Group is able to reduce the time it takes for employees to find the critical information they need. They have also cut down on the amount of physical space needed to store their paper documents and were able to prioritize their office real estate for business activities instead of storage.

    Their new system has also greatly improved their collaboration with partners. Prior to using SharePoint as an ECM system, MJB’s partner communication was bogged down by paper forms. Now, those processes are entirely digital. They can collaborate and share with partners through a secure portal—a much more streamlined collaboration process thanks to their new system.

    “With the KnowledgeLake solution, we have one single place where documents are stored, and can search for and retrieve a specific document in just a few moments. It allows us to be much more productive and to easily access information to make business decisions.”

    – Rama Sundaram, Director of Technology for MJB Wood Group.

     

     

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