If you’re reading PaperFree Corporation’s blog, you are likely familiar with the basics of how document capture converts paper into electronic information. You may even already have a capture system in place. But, do you know how your capture strategy and current technologies measure up to what’s considered today’s best practices?
In a five-part series titled, “Intelligent Enterprise Capture: Delivering Real-World Value”, Sean Baird, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at EMC Corporation explores the practical applications of, and the proven tactics for document capture in the real world. His first installment, which is featured on ECM Connection, is about realizing the significant benefits that new capture technology has brought about. We encourage you to follow Baird’s series and to check our blog frequently for updates.
Realize Significant New Benefits by Using the Latest Capture Breakthroughs
-Sean Baird, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, EMC
Organizations have become very aware of the benefits of document capture, from the obvious value of reducing paper management and consumption to eliminating the manual processing steps that add significant cost and slow down businesses. And you’re probably well aware the document capture solutions are able to convert paper into electronic images and business date. So what else is there? Isn’t document capture a bit passé in an IT strategy that is increasingly focused on how to take advantage of the next wave of computing: the cloud?
The simple answer is that, while document capture is one of the safest and most reliable investments, most organizations are missing significant opportunities to limit the cost of capturing paper, speed the processing documents, and automate the manual tasks that complicate document capture. The reality is that most organizations fail to consider the larger potential savings that document capture can provide, including the ability nearly eliminating manual processing and streamlining business processes that rely upon these paper documents. In this series, we will explore the practical applications of — and proven tactics for — document capture in the real world. We will look at how forward-thinking organizations are able to reap the fastest and highest return on their investments. We will learn ways to leverage the latest capture breakthroughs to address your most pressing business challenges. In practice, intelligent enterprise capture solutions provide scalability to address document capture requirements beyond the department or line of business application, the flexibility to handle the unique requirements of each department or individual businesses, and ease-of-use capabilities to make deployment and maintenance of enterprise systems less expensive.
Capture Anything, From Anywhere
One of the ways that organizations are extending the value of capture is to accelerate the receipt and processing of paper documents. While traditional implementations require paper to be delivered to central locations prior to capture, organizations that extend capture more closely to where paper is received can further reduce costs and add efficiencies.
Take a leading regional insurance company with field adjudicators across several states. They put these techniques in practice throughout their field organizations. Traditionally, they required their agents to send overnight packages to their central offices on a nightly basis; these packages consisted of paper insurance claims, printed photos, and other reports. To simplify and accelerate the capture of insurance claim information, the company provided their agents with scanners, digital cameras, and web-based access to the centralized capture system. As a result, the company was able to nearly eliminate shipping and film development costs and accelerate document processing. They saved millions of dollars for the business, and the efficiencies enable them to provide much better service to their customers.
While this insurance company was successful at transforming their field organization, there are many other examples of organizations that used these same principals to accelerate capture at branch offices, worldwide locations, and enabling front-office workers to capture documents they receive in their own departments. For example, solutions that capture and process invoices can become much more efficient by enabling accounts payable clerks to scan documents directly from their desktops or multi-functional peripheral (MFP) devices. By capturing documents from their desktops, organizations can further accelerate invoice processing.
Transforming Document Information
Another recent development in document capture is document automation, intelligently identifying incoming documents and extracting business information from a variety of different document types. Historically, document capture implementations have relied upon bar codes, patch codes, and separator sheets to identify and separate documents, but these techniques rely upon manual document sorting or control over forms design.
By intelligently identifying documents from structured forms to less structured documents, such as invoices, explanations of benefits, or even correspondence, organizations can eliminate slow, manual document preparation. After documents are identified, there is significant opportunity to eliminate manual data entry. For many years, optical character recognition (OCR) and data extraction technologies have been used successfully for high-volume structured forms, such as tax forms or healthcare claims forms. More recently, intelligent data extraction technologies are being used to successfully extract data from a much wider range of document types. By extending automation beyond a single document type and by making it much easier to configure these systems, document capture provides even more value.
This goes well beyond theoretical value; customers are seeing this value every day. A leading financial services firm has used this technology to process hundreds of different document types and extracting up to 100 fields of information from these documents. By adding intelligent document recognition technologies to automate their document processing, they have replaced their outsourced, offshore manual data entry with automated document classification and extraction.
And the results? 90% of their documents are fully automated, requiring no human touch whatsoever! The documents are identified, all relevant business information is extracted, and the data is validated for accuracy. And the nature of the 10% of the remaining documents has been impacted as well, requiring only minimal exception handling, such as identifying an unknown document type or correcting one data field on a document that fails validation. This can easily save organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars and dramatically streamline document processing.
Finally, the organizations that realize the most value from document capture leverage it throughout their organization. By enabling capture as a service that can be used by different lines of business and departments, organizations are able to leverage the strength of a common platform to help different areas throughout the organization.
These are compelling results and strong proof points for intelligent enterprise capture solutions. Over the next few months, we will extend the conversation regarding intelligent enterprise capture solutions at work in real organizations. We will examine these solutions in more detail and explain how these successful organizations are leveraging document capture as a key component of their information strategies.
A complete print out copy of this series can be found at:
http://downloads.vertmarkets.com/files/downloads/72dac047-6d70-4c3f-a5c4-f5fe8284c426/part1_latestcapturebreakthroughs.pdf">http://downloads.vertmarkets.com/files/downloads/72dac047-6d70-4c3f-a5c4-f5fe8284c426/part1_latestcapturebreakthroughs.pdf
