The following is a guest blog post by Alan Weintraub, Principal Analyst serving Enterprise Architecture Professionals at Forrester. He’s also a nice guy and wicked smart.
Join Alan on August 29 at 2 PM (EDT) for AIIM’s webinar:
Special Briefing of the Forrester Research Multichannel Capture Wave
The following is a preview of what Alan will be discussing. See you next Wednesday; I’ll be hosting one of our webinars for the first time in quite a while.
Many people think capture technology is old, mature, and somewhat boring. It is often believed that the amount of paper we produce is decreasing, but on the contrary we continue to increase the amount of paper that is used for business transactions. When we started to look at creating a multi-channel capture wave, we found that the capture market was not only healthy but is expanding to channels beyond paper. Driven by an increasing number of inquiries, we decided that the time had finally come to evaluate the multi-channel capture market. We set out to evaluate vendors that are going beyond simple paper scanning and focus on the content analytics required to turn stack information into data that can be used in operational system processing. As part of this evaluation, we found that in the next five years, capture platforms will incorporate advanced analytics, mobile solutions, business process management (BPM) and case management, and stronger integration with enterprise production platforms.
Our analysis of the multi-channel capture market has shown us that the direction for multi-channel capture is focused in the ability to automate the capture and extraction of data from unstructured information such as paper, email, fax and forms and then use that data to drive production applications. Those companies that we talked to were focused on finding ways to streamline the capture process while limiting human intervention. The companies with the greatest success were working towards a 90% straight through processing rate. As analytics gets better and the number of OCR options increase, we are seeing the capture vendors creating solutions that target the users’ goals.
We discovered that the capture vendors are moving their focus from dedicated scanners to more distributed capture ranging from mobile devices to MFPs (Multi-functional Printers). The mobile device, i.e., smartphones and tablets, is now becoming a reliable on-ramp to capture unstructured information that can be used in straight through processing. We’ve found that more and more organizations are working on plans to distribute their capture capabilities to these mobile devices in an attempt enable point of origin capture. Many of the capture vendors are developing software for the mobile devices that incorporates enhanced features such as image enhancement, validation, and data extraction. This new capability is the cornerstone that will drive increasing adoption of mobile devices as production on ramps. Just think about it, as more and more companies provide employees with smartphones and tablets, there also supplying employees with capture devices. This creates potential of distributing capture in a manner that we’ve never seen before. We will now be able to provide a cost effective basis in capture device for every employee.
Don't forget to register and join me on August 29; when I will discuss the results of the Forrester multi-channel capture wave.
#BusinessProcessManagement #ScanningandCapture