Document Management - White Paper (ID 5277).pdf Jul. 2014 | Page 26

Integration
Morris & Associates
Manufacturer fills in ERP gaps with DMS metadata
Morris & Associates designs and builds industrial-scale refrigeration products and tracks
most of its engineering and maintenance records in a networked Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) system.
“Our company’s ERP stores all of our vendor information, customer data, projects, job
processes, as well as our inventory,” says IT Manager, Heather Kent. “Pretty much the
entirety of our business is located in this one application, but not everything. In some cases,
there’s some data we’d like to include, but can’t.”
As an example, the company maintains all its part lists in the ERP application, but the
system has no feature to include a photograph or drawing of a part. “When we look up a part
number, we want to bring up the essential data, and also verify if we’ve selected the right
component visually.”
Kent installed the M-Files document management solution to handle the extraneous
documents that did not have a place within its ERP program. Because M-Files contains
an open database platform, Kent discovered she could coordinate the two company-wide
systems to operate with the same project numbers and part lists. This has allowed the
synching of image files with ERP part information displays as well as a host of integrated
tasks.
“One of the great things about M-Files is you can use SQL queries to directly pull information
such as products, parts, or contacts from our existing ERP databases and link it to metadata
on documents in M-Files,” says Kent. “M-Files can actually pull our entire list of parts in our
database. Any time a new part is added to our ERP system, M-Files automatically updates
and pulls that information into its database.”
“The M-Files document management solution turned out to be an excellent fit for our
situation,” adds Kent, “and we keep discovering new uses beyond those we initially
envisioned.”

Storage and Archiving
After adopting a document management solution, the actual
hardware storage location of documents will be irrelevant to
the average user, who accesses what appears to be a single
repository.
In the background however, the system works to manage the
changing conditions of server hardware storage.
The system should have the versatility to change to new storage
locations in the future as the organization grows and new
hardware is introduced.

EASY DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Storage devices have evolved considerably over the last ten
years and will continue advance at a rapid rate. It is important that
companies can easily transfer their data from one data storage
location to another while continuing to access the documents as
before.
The IT administrator should also be able to designate certain
hardware to store backups or archived files. Some systems may
give options pertaining to file retention, including the capability
to automatically delete of certain document types past a certain
age as required for certain types of confidential recordkeeping, or
simply as an efficient use of storage space.
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