Advancements in image capture technology enable you to automate and streamline your business processes.
Integrated Solutions, February 2006.
Written by Khristen Chapin
In a world of increasing automation, you have to wonder at legacy (read: lethargic) processes in your business that rely almost entirely on human intervention. I’m referring to the collection, entry, and indexing of documents in your enterprise, whether those documents are invoices, pieces of mail, or applications. There is no place for such manual labor any longer, and here is what you need to know to do something about it.
In Integrated Solutions’ November 2005 issue, we featured a story on Upromise Investments, Inc., which implemented an image capture and workflow solution and realized impressive benefits. Upromise is a securities broker that focuses on helping families save for college. Like most financial service companies, Upromise receives huge numbers of documents from its customers. The company performed some document imaging for various transactions, but still required employees to manually enter data from the images – and Upromise was processing 5,000 images per day. By installing an image capture and workflow solution, Upromise was able to reduce transaction-handling time from 12 minutes to 2 minutes and save more than $6 million. This example illustrates the obvious operational (and in this case, bottom-line) benefits that automating processes can provide. “The value proposition of business process automation [BPA] is taking incoming business content, scanning it, extracting the data, and validating it against back end databases – all with much less manual involvement,” says Anthony Macciola, VP of product management for document imaging solutions provider Kofax.
To gain this automation, your solution needs to involve both image capture and data extraction capabilities, and it should be able to automatically sort and recognize relevant and critical documents and data. “Companies should start by looking for a solution that automates the following manually intensive processes,” says Jim Vickers, chief marketing officer, Captiva Software Corp. “Those are document preparation, batch sorting, document identification and classification, data capture and entry, QA [quality assurance] and defect identification, and document routing. The ideal solution should also be able to integrate with back end ERP [enterprise resource planning], ECM [enterprise content management], and CRM [customer relationship management] systems from most major vendors [e.g. EMC, SAP, Microsoft, IBM].”
A few years ago, image capture still involved a good deal of manual labor; just look at what Upromise was doing before implementing its new solution. Or, image capture was only good for companies receiving a large number of the same documents, such as checks or standard registration forms. Capture software could be programmed with document templates, and the program collected the data in each field because it knew where the fields would be, based on the document type. If companies received nonstandard documents, employees had to intervene and enter data manually into systems. Companies like mortgage and insurance companies, as well as those in the government and legal fields, all of which receive a range of document types, were left heavily reliant on manual labor to image and input data from documents.
UNSTRUCTURED FORMS PROCESSING OPENS UP IMAGING POSSIBILITIES
Now, however, advancements in unstructured forms processing make BPA a possibility for companies of all types. “Unstructured forms processing does not require defined templates,” says Steve Chahal, chief marketing officer of imaging solutions provider Fairfax Imaging. “This technology is based on a morphological understanding of the image space. The software can understand the document and knows, by preset rules, which data it should look for.” With unstructured forms processing, companies receiving a variety of documents can automate the imaging and indexing of them. A mortgage company, for example, can program the software to look for names, Social Security numbers, and account numbers. Even companies that receive invoices from a variety of vendors, such as manufacturing companies, can have the imaging software look for purchase order numbers.
VOLUME, COMPLEXITY DETERMINE INVESTMENT FEASIBILITY
When talking automation – scanning and indexing images as they arrive – conversation almost always goes to a digital mailroom. These imaging solutions can automatically open, scan, index, and route mail coming into a centralized area of your company. However, implementing a digital mailroom involves a large upfront investment – the high-volume scanner alone can cost a couple hundred thousand dollars. But depending on the volume of mail you process, it may be worth the investment. “Companies can do a pseudo-ROI calculation by looking at their current volume, types of documents, and the amount they’re spending on labor now versus the cost of the solution,” says Chahal. “Obviously there are gray areas, but a general rule of thumb is that companies processing a few thousand invoices per day will receive a pretty quick payback. Don’t accept a payback in excess of two years.” Hidden costs of software can arise in the complexity of your documents. Normally, the cost of software is driven by volume – the number of licenses needed. It can also be increased, however, by the need to process more complex documents which take more time to capture, and therefore your efficiency improvements won’t be realized as quickly. You also may have to pay an up-front fee for extensive customization of capture software.
DISTRIBUTED SCANNING CAN REDUCE IMAGING INVESTMENT
If a digital mailroom just isn’t feasible for you, there is an alternative solution. Distributed scanning, where documents are scanned at the point of entry into your business (e.g. intracompany departments, regional offices), is becoming more and more popular. “A recent study by InfoTrends showed that 26% of respondents plan to move to a decentralized scanning approach for reduced operational costs and improved efficiencies,” says Vickers. Distributed scanning enables companies to get information from paper documents – and, more importantly, act on it – more quickly than standard methods. “Rather than having regional offices ship loan origination packets to central facilities to be processed, those remote offices can scan and capture the information right there,” says Macciola of Kofax. “Organizations want to truncate paper as quickly as they can, and they want to do that at the point the information is generated.” This method of image capture is prevalent in financial services operations, such as mortgage and loan offices, as well as insurance entities and medical organizations. However, the technology isn’t limited by vertical market; it can bring benefits to any company with distributed offices. Distributed scanning still requires advanced software, as images scanned in regional offices need to be correctly indexed and combined with back end software. The scanner investment isn’t as high, though, and the costs can be shouldered departmentally. Beware of one thing though, and that is reduced quality. “Sometimes in distributed scanning situations, regional offices use lowquality scanners that degrade the image quality,” says Chahal. Developing a corporate policy that standardizes on scanners might be a way to avoid compromised image quality.
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Image Capture Leads To Automation
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