Generis Knowledge Management
CARA-Facilitating the Management of Documents

Modern day organizations fighting the dreaded “silo mentality” face the issue of categorizing and storing documents and other content generated by their daily processes. CIOs end up maintaining varied systems and searching for appropriate staff in the IT department to run a complicated show. The need of the hour is a platform designed to fix the information disconnect between different content management solutions built up over time in order to respond to individual business needs. Headquartered in Sarasota, FL, Generis Knowledge Management is providing organizations with an ergonomically designed and fast web user interface and business rules engine to facilitate the creation, review, approval, and management of documents. “We saw the need fora simple and fast system that could be considered in any use case and introduced CARA, providing core repository functionality, performance enhancements anduser-friendly features,” says James Kelleher, the CEO of Generis.

According to Kelleher, industries facetime and cost constraints that require them to have systems that they can deploy quickly, maintain with a minimum of effort, and are both configurable and easily customizable. In addition, companies want systems that users can personalize to their own tastes, but that are simple and easy to use. “One size no longer fits all,” adds Kelleher. “Companies need systems that deliver only the required user experience and functionality appropriate to a particular user’s role. Someone who logs into once a month to approve a document needs a far simpler UI and set of features than someone who is in the system every day, working on hundreds of documents at a time.” Generis provides just such content and information management systems for regulated industries in order to bring efficient experience through their revolutionary product, CARA.

CARA is both a document management system and integration point for applications. There are document creation wizards that include features like drag and drop from email or Windows Explorer / Mac Finder.

CARA supports collaborative authoring and review, and approvals with signatures and auditing.“CARA also displays supporting information in the Widgets Pane: users click on a document to instantly see a wealth of information,” explains Kelleher.

Companies are looking for systems that provide different user experiences based on roles, and offer a high level of configurability. The system has to adapt itself to users as they work

Generish as an impressive and varied clientele list including Bayer, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb,General Reinsurance, Sargento Foods and QVC Television. The benefits these firms gain from CARA can be transformational. One of Generis’ larger clients had built up a number of silo Content Management systems over the years to different needs. All the documents were dependent on each other in some way, but there was no way to move data between systems. The client adopted CARA as the single application for all content management, allowing the client to reduce duplicate data entry, save costs and improve compliance.

“In the coming years, we want to increase consulting activities for deploying CARA software, and extend both industry coverage and the number of back-end platforms supported,” concludes Kelleher.