An introduction to SpringCM

A lot has been going on in the 6 months since 4C and SpringCM announced the launch of their official delivery partnership for the EMEA region.

4C has started implementation projects with some major organisations such as Moneysupermaket, SThree, Bruntwood, Rentokill and Gocardless to name just a few. To meet this increase in demand, the 4C SpringCM delivery team has tripled and looks set to continue it’s growth over the coming months.

But what exactly is SpringCM, what are it’s top features, and how can it help your organisation?

We caught up with Adam Dessurne, SpringCM Practice Manager here at 4C, for a Q and A session to find out more.

Video transcript

My name’s Adam and I head up the SpringCM department here at 4C, focussing on UK and EMEA.

Q: What is SpringCM?

SpringCM is a content management system. It allows customers to manage, store and track their content. When we talk about content we’re talking about documentation or files or contracts that are going to be routing around a business.

Q: How does it integrate with Salesforce?

SpirngCM has an app on the Salesforce App exchange. It basically allows a really simple integration between a Salesforce record and a folder in SpringCM. What that means is you might have an account or an opportunity in Salesforce and you want to store documents or content against that record in Salesforce, SpringCM enables a widget on the page that is very interactive that you can drag and drop documents into that folder and also play around with the data that you are going to be capturing on that document against that record.

Q: What type of business could take advantage of SpringCM?

Any business in any industry could take advantage of SpringCM. At the end of the day, every department in any type of vertical or industry has contracts and wants to be able to manage and store documentation or contracts within a central repository in a structured way to allow searching and reporting capabilities.

Q: What challenges is SpringCM helping customers overcome?

The core challenges that we see customers overcome by implementing SpringCM is around getting their contracts and documents in a secure and managed way within SpringCM. What I mean by that is you can build out a folder taxonomy in SpringCM that is tailored to a paricular company and can branch off in different areas for that folder structure and it’s all about how do we get documents that are potentially on different machines, different hard drives, maybe in a different cloud solution, how do we get them into one central repository so that reporting, searching and understanding what position your contracts are in with your customers or suppliers is a lot easier to find that information.

Q: What are the top features of SpringCM?

Number one has to be the worflow engine that supports SpringCM from an automation perspective. So, the workflow will allow the jouney of a document throughout the business, whether it’s going to an external party, whether it’s going to be a SpringCM user, whether it’s going to be the customer, or a legal or procurement group, it will allow that jouney to take place in a very automated fashion, without somebody having to remember to do something on that contract. So the workflow for me is the key component that brings all of this together and allows a contract to move throughout the business in a very quick and easy way.

The second point would probably be the central repository. So the security measures within SpringCM are second to none and you can define access and accessibility per user or per group to certain folders and certain files within SpringCM. So you can turn off permissions so that someone can’t edit or download a document but they can just view the document within SpringCM as an example. So you can start controlling who can actually interact with a document and when they can interact with it aswell. So as part of that workflow process a business might not want the user to interact with a contract because it’s been sent out for signature - well then lets make sure that we lock down that contract once it’s been sent for signature so there’s no ammendments made to that contract until it has come back from the customer, whether it’s signed or rejected.

Another key component is the OCR. The OCR recognition and search functionality in SpringCM will allow you to search for any word or any sentence or paragraph within a document that’s stored inside SpringCM. Sometimes a use case for a customer is, the don’t want to do anything fancy, or automated, they simply want to be able to undertand what contracts they’ve got and what clauses they’ve got in those contracts. A simple way of doing that is uploading those contracts directly into SpringCM and immediately you get the search capability to search for any word or clause or paragraph within that doucment. So without having a massive implementation or going down the route of streamlining any process, simply just by getting those documents into SpringCM, customers are already in a better place.

Q: Who are you currently working with and what benefits are they seeing?

We’re working with a particular recruitment company and as part of that project we’re doing a global rollout for quite a large number of users and a large use case around client contracts between the recruitment company and their clients so that they can offer contracts, whether thats a contract or a permnanent job placement that they are trying to offer to their clients, it allows that flexibility and ease of negotiation between the recruiter and the end client.

Another exmaple is we’re working with a software company based in Europe. They are looking for a procurement solution so that they can upload all of their procurement contracts and start reporting and searching on what contracts they’ve got in place with certain suppliers. They are also looking for sales contracts around, and this is more post sales, so the idea is that they have already agreed a contract with someone, but they want to use SpringCM to store and manage that contract after sale. So what they do is upload that document into SpringCM, they tag it with the right metadata (metadata allows you to report on that contract in an easy way) and then there’s a really simple approval process that goes to legal and finance so that they can confirm and understand the limitation of liablility, the payment terms, the pricing, whatever it is they need to understand in that contract to fulfil their jobs.

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