Successful implementation of an OpenText solution is only the first step on the journey to improving enterprise content management and streamlining internal workflows. What is more challenging is to maintain, support, and adapt the solution to the changing business and legislative requirements. In today’s business world, organizations need to ensure 100% uptime of their OpenText ECM systems to stay competitive on the market.
If your company has never maintained an OpenText ECM system, it will take years for your employees to learn all the ins and outs of the system to run it effectively. And it can take even longer to develop best practices to get the maximum value from your solution.
OpenText offers professional support services within the first twelve months after the system implementation. It eliminates the headache of tackling dozens of technical issues that arise after the system rollout. However, at the end of the support program, you end up at the crossroads trying to decide whether to stay with OpenText or go with global consulting heavyweights. Yet, both variants are rather expensive. So is there an alternative?
By referring to a boutique managed services provider that specializes in niche technologies, you can unlock the true potential of your ECM solutions. At N-iX, we strongly believe that OpenText maintenance can be a hassle-free experience. We have worked with OpenText products for over 12 years, building on our expertise and gathering best practices. And here come the solutions to the common problems companies often encounter with OpenText support.
Problem 1. Untimely resolution of issues
Long ticket closing cycles is one of the most acute issues that enterprises face. The reason for it is the lack of the in-house expertise with OpenText systems. If an internal support team isn’t backed by a partner with the corresponding technical expertise, issues can stay unresolved forever. Getting solution support from global consulting heavyweights can be of little help: tickets are processed by low-skilled engineers, and it takes days or weeks before the issues get resolved or escalated to the knowledgeable staff. Without effective support processes and due professional experience at all levels, timely resolution of tickets is challenging.
Solution:
To cut ticket resolution times, it is important to choose a support partner with a strong background in OpenText technologies. As for the tech expertise, you should hire certified OpenText consultants with deep industry knowledge and solid track record of successful projects.
Enterprises that realize how good maintenance impacts the ROI of their OpenText solutions usually opt for dedicated OpenText consultants. With this model, experts are more focused on the client’s project and can resolve issues more effectively and within a shorter time frame.
In addition, a provider should offer you an SLA that would define the availability of support consultants and response times for the first, second and third level support. An agreement should also cover per-incident support during customer’s working hours to keep the system always available.
In our company, we do care about the professional development of our specialists and invest in their education. We can provide our clients with an access to a wide engineering talent pool of experts in .NET, Java, Ruby, Scala, PHP, Python, JavaScript, and other technologies. This way, we ensure fast resolution of tickets and peak performance of the system.
Problem 2. High Service Costs
Cost efficiency is a burning issue for most companies using OpenText. Local OpenText consultants and technical support specialists from OpenText charge exorbitant fees with extra charges that are difficult to track and control. Nonetheless, companies don’t want to reduce costs at the expense of the quality of the support services. Many businesses believe that lower prices that tech companies in Eastern Europe offer mean lower quality. In fact, it is a common myth that needs to be debunked.
Solution:
Finding a reliable managed services provider in Eastern Europe, where rates are more acceptable and the quality of service is high, can be a viable option. Companies in the region offer services at half of the market price without compromising quality. Eastern European specialists boast strong technical education and share a Western business mindset.
Based in Eastern Europe, N-iX has all that plus an excellent track record in OpenText managed services. In fact, many local OpenText integrators reach out to us with the request to help them implement and support OpenText solutions for their clients. So it makes a perfect sense to contact a third-party managed services provider directly without referring to local consultants who act as intermediaries driving overhead expenses. By partnering with a trusted provider in Eastern Europe, you will be able to negotiate a reasonable fee and take control of your budget.
Problem 3. Poor system performance
Low performance of an OpenText solution usually lies in poor solution architecture. It often appears that bottlenecks could have been removed easily if they were foreseen in the solution design. In addition, the lack of understanding of best practices by the support engineers who maintain and develop the solution leads to the accumulation of technical debt, which results in disrupting business processes at peak loads. Poor physical configuration of the environment and underutilization of the infrastructure also prevent the system from working efficiently. Thus enterprises can’t leverage the full potential of their OpenText solutions.
Solution:
To make sure that the solution works as it should, it is important to ensure that it meets best practices. From our experience, a good solution design can improve overall performance manifold. As a part of N-iX professional services, our consultants always audit solution architecture to identify and remove performance bottlenecks.
When a support team enhances the existing solution and builds up additional functionality, they may disrupt its performance because they fail to follow its best practices laid down in the solution design. So it is important for an OpenText managed services provider to have experts who can implement vital functional changes following existing patterns or redesign the solution architecture so that not to undermine its performance.
Problem 4. Lack of flexibility to accommodate changing requirements
Today, you can hardly find an industry that stands on the sidelines of digital transformations. Business and legislative needs are changing faster than ever, and if you fail to keep up, you risk losing your market share. Your OpenText ECM solution may satisfy your needs when you go live, but in a year, they are likely to change dramatically. Besides, even after the system implementation, no one can be sure that the implemented functionality ideally fits the needs of the company. It takes months or years of using the system to understand how it can be adjusted to cover the existing business processes. When implementing new business scenarios, your OpenText team needs strong knowledge of the technology to maintain the same high level of quality of the solution.
Enterprise content management market is soaring trying to catch up with the innovations. As Technavio predicts, it will grow at a CAGR of 16% by 2022. So ECM solutions like OpenText will see major transformations due to new industry standards. And here comes the problem of customization. Many businesses are concerned whether managed services providers will have enough expertise to adapt their solutions to the changing requirements.
Solution:
Due to new business or legislative requirements, our clients constantly need to enhance their OpenText systems to maintain stiff competition. Our strong expertise in OpenText technologies and best practices allow us to continuously extend customer solutions with new business cases and enhancements in technologies and user experience. This includes the development of new document forms, workflows, statistics reports, dashboards as well as integration with key enterprise applications in customer’s IT landscape, such as ERP, CRM, BPM, etc. So we provide our clients with the complete set of application managed services that on the one hand, ensure the best performance of the solution and on the other hand, enable the flexibility to change as the business evolves.
Related: How to create template documents in OpenText Content Server
Wrap-up
Timely prevention of issues and ongoing support of an OpenText solution determine whether the company can operate smoothly without interrupting business processes. And the last thing any organization wants is to be left alone out there with maintaining and supporting an OpenText ECM solution. Partnering with a reliable managed services provider can shield you from all the possible pitfalls on the way and save costs without sacrificing quality.
N-iX offers a comprehensive set of expertise in different OpenText products, modules, and integrations. Our consultants have implemented and maintained OpenText solutions in various industries, such as utilities, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, insurance, telecom etc. Our clients come from around the globe: Europe, North America, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. When you entrust OpenText application management to N-iX, ultimately you receive the hassle-free OpenText ECM experience.
