CaseStudy

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 03 - June 2010

Margot Weigl of Kofax offers a compelling business case for automating document-driven business processes

The benefits brought from automating document intensive business processes cannot be overstated. In the US and Europe alone over 20 million tons of office paper is produced and consumed every year. The use of paper remains pervasive across many industries, resulting in high administrative overhead costs and too many points of failure as documents are routed throughout the organisation.
A recent research report by Aberdeen Group found that 75% of companies surveyed employ predominantly paper based processes to manage their accounts payables (AP) function, taking as long as 33 days to process an invoice at a cost of $37. Paper based invoice processing is labour intensive and subject to multiple points of failure - from the time an invoice is received until it is matched, validated, reconciled and finally paid. Accounts payable staff spend 40% of their time researching information to simply respond to basic supplier inquiries such as invoice receipt and payment status. AP staff also lack sufficient visibility into their cash management processes and cannot maximise financial advantages from early payment discounts.

Document Capture Moves to Mainstream

Within these document intensive applications, early adopters of capture tools have been the individual departments most affected by slow and expensive manual paper processes. Frequently each front office department would discover the benefits of capture independently, with little cross-departmental consideration.
High volume document capture systems have also been found in the back offices where the same document functions had previously been performed manually. Many of these forms processing operations process incoming paper documents in batches using high volume scanners. In its early days, capture's role was almost exclusively one of scanning to a manually indexed archive.

Unfortunately, centralised capture operations separate data entry from the very business processes they intend to serve. Moreover, when document capture is only used at the end of a process, organisations fail to realise the benefits of integrating data capture with transactional business processes. The benefits of early capture include eliminating paper as soon as it enters the organisation, reducing points of failure, accelerating business processes, improving customer service and shifting resources away from tedious labour intensive tasks to higher value activities.

Given the clear benefits, progressive companies around the world are moving document capture to the beginning of the business process. The accelerated adoption of desktop scanners and multifunction peripheral devices (MFPs) provides an indicator of this changing landscape. There is a shift toward transactional capture solutions that enable organisations to directly and reliably integrate capture into their document driven business processes.
Document capture has evolved far beyond its roots in scanning to archives. Document capture systems now feed and initiate transactional and time sensitive business processes, enabling document driven business process automation by:

• Transforming paper based documents into digital images as soon as they enter the organisation;
• Delivering outstanding image quality for any scanned document;
• Capturing, classifying, extracting and validating any document or form, regardless of format or type;
• Automating the straight-through processing of information into workflows and business systems; and
• Auditing the processing of all documents from point of receipt through to archiving.

Extend the Value of Existing Capture Investments

Business processes rely equally on both front and back office operations. The centralised capture, data crunching, back office operations have proven themselves to be an extremely efficient means of extracting information from high volume structured documents. Likewise, capture deployed by multiple departments in the front office has established its value in improved customer service and process efficiency. Semi-structured documents such as invoices can now be scanned "locally" and the document content reliably and accurately extracted.

The reality of today's work processes makes this a hybrid world. Scanning need not be a "here or there," front or back office operation. The key is to get the two sides communicating more efficiently. By taking this enterprise approach to capture, organisations can greatly increase the return on their existing investments in both staff and technology.

The network infrastructures, which have become an organisation's communication backbone, are that much more effective when paper based and electronic information can be seamlessly integrated. Document repositories become more than storehouses of archival records when ongoing transactions can access and update information in real time. As for investments in personnel, workers enjoy substantial productivity gains when paper documents do not interrupt work, but are simply a connected part of any business process.

Employees are not only able to focus on higher value tasks, but are also more productive in an environment of real time information sharing. This organisational responsiveness leads in turn to additional benefits.

Customer service improves when "waiting for documents" can be eliminated from the corporate mentality. Vendor relations improve when payments are no longer delayed due to missing verifications. Regulatory filings are more timely, payments are received more quickly, and most importantly, businesses can react instantly to a changing environment, which offers a distinct competitive advantage.

Technology and Process in Harmony

Enterprise capture synergy means extending the value of existing technology. For example, simple ad hoc scanning capabilities such as scan-to-email and scan-to-fax features can greatly enhance current investments in office automation tools. When built on a common capture platform, each department's favoured communication tool - email, fax, MFP or desktop scanner - can be immediately integrated without additional investment.
Maximising the potential of an integrated, enterprise wide, document capture platform requires consideration of how well the existing technologies interact. As with networking efforts of the past, a highly customised proprietary infrastructure will be more expensive to implement and more difficult to manage. Cross-departmental collaboration can be hampered if the tools don't play well together. With a standards based platform, many of the compatibility issues that plagued earlier collaboration attempts can be avoided.

An organisation's centralised, high volume capture infrastructure must work in tandem with the distributed document capture processes prevalent in individual departments. For all areas to communicate easily, an organisation should have a stable, consistent architecture. A unified infrastructure ensures that both scan-to-archive and scan-to-process capture operations are able to work harmoniously, feeding data into a cohesive business process.
Ideally, the capture platform will provide the scalability needed to meet the full range of document capture demands, from individual desktop and ad hoc workgroup users all the way up to production level volumes. A single provider should be able to offer consistency across all areas. In addition to offering a consistent platform in both the front and back office capture operations, the capture platform should be equally adept at processing the range of documents types coming into transactional business processes.

Rather than designating separate software products for different document types-structured, semi-structured or unstructured-a single vendor that can handle all three provides consistency in user interface, key features and functions. Further, the system should be designed to accept both paper documents (scanned) as well as electronic content. With the right solution in place, it shouldn't matter what form documents arrive in.

Summary

An enterprise capture platform such as that offered by Kofax can offer unmatched scalability from centralised to highly distributed environments, from individual desktops to enterprise deployments and from basic archival scanning to powerful document classification and separation and data extraction. The company's market leading technology supports a wide variety of input devices and line of business applications, providing a strong enterprise wide platform on which to standardise document driven processes.

Information enters organisations in a number of ways - paper, fax and electronic - so a comprehensive capture system must accommodate documents regardless of their format. When integrating documents into existing business process workflows, a scalable capture platform built on an open architecture ensures compatibility between existing hardware devices, relational databases, content management systems and related networking infrastructures.
With a move toward an integrated enterprise approach to document processing, organisations can reap exponential benefits from their capture investments, significantly improving the efficiency of document-centric operations and reducing costs while improving process quality. An enterprise capture approach offers the following tangible benefits:

• Immediate cost savings;
• Reduced redundancies;
• Increased information accuracy;
• Eliminated delays;
• Decreased repetitive manual handling;
• Increased productivity;
• More secure document control;
• Ability to react more quickly to inquiries;
• Faster, more reliable decision making.

Document intensive business processes are much more efficient in an environment of front and back office symbiosis. An enterprise approach to capture results in lower costs, better document security, increased productivity, improved customer relations, simplified regulatory compliance and faster exception processing.
Enterprise capture is a compelling investment that offers a demonstrable ROI that's relatively easy to calculate.

More info: www.kofax.com/solutions

CaseStudy