The Importance of CCM/UX Upgrades

Staying up-to-date with software features, fixes, and versions help to ensure that your organization mitigates risk and extracts as much value as possible from it’s investment in CCM solutions.  Nonetheless, planning for these events can be very time-consuming and stressful for all parties involved.  Whether you’re simply upgrading an existing implementation or looking to migrate to OpenText ExStream, Quadient Inspire, GhostDraft, Oracle Documaker, Smart Communications, or another CCM solution, our experienced team can provide critical guidance and assistance necessary to ensure that your system upgrade or migration avoids critical pitfalls and is successfully achieved on-time and under budget.

Reasons you should be considering one

New Functionality

Newer versions or platforms often have updated functionality & technology that aligns better with changing and demanding business needs. Older product versions or legacy platforms typically lack features that are an absolute requirement for a business to remain competitive in a digital world.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Mergers & acquisitions often serve as a catalyst for systems upgrades or migrations to a homogeneous platform across the enterprise. There are organizations running and supporting multiple systems, which can be expensive and difficult to maintain and support.

Lack of Support

Applications that have reached end-of-life pose an underappreciated risk. Any production outages often have zero vendor support, leaving the business in the precarious position of hoping they can fix the problem without any formal assistance.

Knowledge Capital Loss

Natural staff turnover creates an underlying risk and departing personnel take knowledge of legacy systems that cannot be easily replaced with the hiring of new staff who are unfamiliar with these older applications.

Hidden Costs

Legacy solutions often have hidden underlying costs. Significant savings can be realized by upgrading to newer platforms that can eliminate custom code and require less retrofitting and manual maintenance.

Affiliated Systems

Older CCM applications have dependencies upon affiliated systems for various functions such as storage and integration and often do not support upgraded versions of these systems, forcing the business to hold back upgrades.

Things that you need to plan for

Data

Identification and establishment of data standards is a critical component to any upgrade or migration. Newer systems may benefit from different formats & layouts, so it’s very important make Data a key priority.

Business Logic

Determine what business intelligence should be moved forward and establish a roadmap if undergoing a migration. Identify which logic/rules belong in a publishing platform and which best reside upstream.

Upstream Integration

Newer systems usually accommodate more stream-lined or loosely-coupled integration mechanisms. Identify current integration processes and determine which can or should be improved.

Technology Stack

Determine the complete technology stack required by the target CCM platform and ensure that your organization is prepared to support and maintain all applicable system pre-requisites.

Operational requirements

Identify post-print operational requirements: print-operations, finishing equipment specifications, print-outsourcing requirements, including any print-stream conditions mandated by finishing equipment.

Downstream Integration

Identify any downstream integration requirements: e-Signature integration, DMS integration, imaging system integration.  Also be sure to identify any electronic distribution requirements (email, SMS, etc).

Where to start

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Establish Goals & Objectives

Start by establishing clear priorities, goals, and objectives to be accomplished with the system upgrade or migration.

Identify the Sponsor

Identify and engage an internal resource who is willing to sponsor and champion the effort.

Engage Subject Matter Experts

Source and engage key subject matter experts who have the capability and vision to work with the project team to achieve the established objectives.

Perform a POC

Work toward a “quick win” by performing a small project designed to prove to the business/sponsor that the established goals and objectives can be met successfully.