Many public and private sector organisations are using SAP solutions to streamline their business processes and effectively manage their diverse records and documents. Locked in these records and documents is a wealth of mission-critical information.
"The key to unlocking this wealth lies in the ability to discover the knowledge contained in the information," declares Piet Dempsey, managing director of Knowledge Focus. "Because it is distributed across a wide spectrum of sources, however, this can be a time-consuming and costly exercise and even prevent the organisation from realising the full potential of its SAP investment.
"While most companies understand the importance and value of their information, few are aware of how much time their employees devote to searching for it when they need it," he continues. "Failure to find the right information and deliver it on time can prevent managers from making informed decisions, which can mean the difference between winning or losing new business."
Dempsey points to research done by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), the IDC and engineering organisations, which shows that employees spend between 15% and 40% of their time each year searching for the information they need to do their jobs.
"In financial terms, these searches can become costly. If a company spends R500 million a year on salaries, 15% of that sum equates to R75 million and 40% to R200 million. These losses in wasted time and computer resources, not to mention lost opportunities, can be significantly reduced simply by managing and sharing information more effectively."
Knowledge Focus is the local Convera distributor of RetrievalWare, a secure, highly scalable search platform that allows users to index, search, categorise and link information across a wide range of distributed sources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, and more than 200 file types and formats residing in relational databases, groupware repositories, document management systems, file servers and Web servers.
Through the combination of advanced search methods and unique categorisation and classification technologies, RetrievalWare achieves optimised precision and recall across the hundreds of thousands of documents that exist in an organisation. The product offers three search methods - concept, pattern and Boolean - which can be used independently or interactively to enable users to search what they want to quickly, easily and confidently. Additionally, its advanced categorisation and dynamic classification features enable users to discover links, knowledge and expertise embedded within otherwise scattered information sources.
"RetrievalWare enables organisations to get the most out of their SAP investment by providing a search platform that complements and enhances the capabilities offered by the SAP R/3 ERP system," says Dempsey.
The SAP R/3 ERP system contains a variety of data, document, knowledge and records management tools. To fulfil a wide range of different requirements, SAP provides components like the SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP Knowledge Warehouse, the SAP Document Management System (DMS), Collaboration tools, Engineering Change Management functionality and SAP Records Management. Nearly all SAP components rely on a proven, highly scalable, and robust common document management infrastructure that includes the SAP Knowledge Provider, ArchiveLink and SAP Content Server. The SAP DMS provides a comprehensive solution document versions and structures, approval- and change-management, workflow, distribution, Web access and document integration to business processes and objects.
Knowledge Focus and Engineering Informatics (EI), a company that specialises in the implementation of the SAP enterprise document and record management systems and related functionality, have implemented numerous document management solutions together, providing customers with efficient document management processes, including advanced retrieval capabilities. The two companies` integration experts have saved customers months on implementation time.
"By using dynamic knowledge discovery organisations can better share information and expertise, and make faster and more informed decisions. Consequently, they are able to reap the full value of all their human and information assets," Dempsey concludes.
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Headquartered in Pretoria, Knowledge Focus markets a range of products to help customers manage their information assets. The company supports and serves organisations that need to retrieve information (knowledge) quickly and accurately.
In short, it is able to assist any organisation that has problems in finding its information. Knowledge Focus concentrates on the knowledge retrieval and knowledge preservation markets with special attention to the delivery of information (knowledge) for the competitive intelligence (CI) and strategic marketing intelligence (SMI) markets, and is a master reseller for a number of exciting technologies that enable these business functionalities.
Through these technologies, including Convera`s products, the company is able to assist organisations in storing and retrieving data from the following internal and external sources: general office documents, intranets, groupware applications, ERP systems, existing document management systems, the Internet, relational databases, digital images, video and paper-based documents. Knowledge Focus` clients include Eskom, Technikon SA, Gensec, Kumba Resources, government, M-Net and NEMISA.
Convera`s RetrievalWare
RetrievalWare is a high-performance multimedia, cross- and multilingual search system that allows broad flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets. RetrievalWare enables users to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, over 200 proprietary document formats (such as word processors and publishing systems), relational database tables, document management systems, and groupware repositories. Advanced search capabilities include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching, and query-by-example. RetrievalWare excels in distributed client/server environments with thousands of users, documents, images, and/or multiple media assets.
Convera
Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search, retrieval and categorisation solutions. Convera`s RetrievalWare solutions maximise return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages. More than 750 customers in over 29 countries rely on Convera`s search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more.
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