How a Content Management System Can Help Streamline Your Business

 The reality is that running a business is such a diverse and complex endeavor that managing complex and rapidly evolving software solutions needed to execute the mission can be an overwhelming component. It already takes enough energy and expertise to be proficient in managing people, knowing your vertical, regulating cash flow, envisioning new products, evaluating old products, and on and on and on. The problem, however, is that if you don’t leverage complex and rapidly evolving software solutions to handle processes, you end up drowning in inefficiency and inconsistency. So therein lies a significant and difficult problem because you likely didn’t get into business to become an informal senior software architect. And that’s where leveraging something like a robust CMS comes into play. 

Let’s look at some of the ways leveraging a modern CMS, like Drupal, for example, can significantly streamline your business and free you to, well, run your business.

CMS is more than a CMS 

So in simplest terms, a CMS is a Content Management System. Historically, that basically meant providing standard functionality for perhaps managing blog content for a public website. The truth is, however, today it’s far more than that. There’s a whole range of CMS options that vary from that ultimately simple blog scenario to enterprise level development frameworks upon which you can build nearly any kind of web-based software solution. So in its infancy, it may have been largely all about getting a simple “brochure” site up with some basic management, but today it’s being used to provide some of the most sophisticated enterprise web solutions that are critical to modern business strategy. And in many cases, it’s leveraged internally to empower the management of the business in a highly effective and efficient manner. We’ll cover some more tangible examples in a minute, but first we need to get an important question out of the way. 

Which CMS? 

A CMS is a broad-ranging category of systems, and there is still a ton of flexibility in choosing a CMS. In fact, we’ve written articles on this topic and built a little tool to help you figure that out. The different management systems cover a wide range of use cases, so it can be difficult to determine which is right for a given situation at times. There are a number of extremely simple CMS setups that can work great on a low budget, with very flexible requirements, and without needs for complex solutions like custom integrations. On the other end are systems like Drupal (our CMS framework of choice) that allows you do virtually anything you want as well as continue to leverage a whole lot of components included in the core system or built by those extending the system in powerful ways. It’s this latter category of enterprise-level customizable CMS that we will focus on here because that’s where the exciting power lies.

Real world scenarios

Let’s look at some specific examples of just what these systems can do. And this isn’t hypothetical. These are exactly the types of solutions we’ve built for our clients with an extensible CMS platform like Drupal as our starting point.

Employee collaboration

Email. Chat. Documents. Meetings. There is a lot of internal chatter and management that goes on within a corporation, and the magnitude of the management of that cannot be overstated. Who hasn’t found themselves almost daily wanting to just disconnect from the internet for 20 minutes to take a breather from all the chaos swirling around? Well, the right CMS can mitigate a lot of that. You can use a whole host of building blocks to build an employee portal where coworkers can chat, send notifications, collaborate on policy documents, receive corporate notifications, see a team calendar, reserve a conference room, assign tasks, etc - all with deep tracking and revisioning and all within one ecosystem that is accessible from the desktop, the laptop, and mobile devices. With this strategy, you find yourself having a whole different experience. No more depending on how different people like to store and organize their local copy of largely outdated documents. No more relying on email history to track a decision that was made or find a digital asset. No more walking around the hall looking for an empty conference room. No more being stuck solving an accounting problem because that person is on vacation and has a local spreadsheet on their laptop. Best of all - everyone uses the same tools and those tools are managed from a single infrastructure. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Client management

Let’s be honest - managing clients is often more difficult than managing your own workforce because your clients aren’t in your building, on your schedule, or under your control. There are countless phone calls, emails, shared documents, meeting decisions, deadlines, and other elements that can make it easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. And it can be overwhelming to manage and well, frankly, quite embarrassing when something slips through the cracks or someone who needs to know isn’t in the know.

A CMS based solution can provide a platform to minimize and consolidate client management needs into a system that depends far less on individual availability and manual process and allows for a much more robust client relationship. Using a CMS as a platform, you can build systems that allow sending an invoice in a few clicks, with automated reminders and tracking of unpaid invoices. That same system can allow clients to track progress on major requests, and send or request updates. It can also run reports on product subscriptions that are set to expire, or highlight clients that are typically late paying their bills, or prioritize requests that haven’t been responded to in the past x days. It can also allow clients to pay their invoices online, engage live chat support, access help documentation, or receive alerts about upcoming products - again, all tracked in a single ecosystem and in full view of everyone in your business who needs visibility of some or all of the client engagement. It can literally transform how things are done and has huge ROI potential because it literally may save you from losing clients and make the ones that stay happier.

Content or product management

So what about managing the products or services your company actually provides? A CMS can do that too. It might mean allowing those who manage the warehouse to manage inventory, which is immediately reflected on the public-facing ecommerce site. Or it might mean serving, tracking and reporting online ads. Or it may mean providing a robust content management workflow for new stories and white papers that you offer your customers. And it all can leverage the same building blocks for tracking, notifications, document management, user roles, and permissions, etc., that a modern CMS can provide. Better yet, multiple CMS systems can even be built to talk to each other so that perhaps your Client Management system can get info about products your client has purchased from your Product Management or your Employee Collaboration system can be told to set follow-up reminders for your employees based on the activity of their clients. Or maybe all of these systems are really just one system that gives appropriate access to all who need it. The possibilities are endless.

So where do we go next?

So we’re only scratching the surface here, but if you have a heavy dependence on manual processes, or a lot of duplication of effort, or a difficulty tracking all the moving requirements, conversations or documentation - then a robust software solution built upon a CMS could be a key opportunity to making your processes more efficient and effective and allow you to focus on building your business, not running your business. The web today is not the web it even was 5 years ago so taking the time to see what’s possible can really change your whole perspective on how your business can function. Exciting times!