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Document Capture: Moving from Back to Front

By Anthony Macciola posted 08-09-2010 11:47

  

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Document Capture?

  • Trained document preparation operators sorting documents into similar document types, removing paper clips, unfolding corners and inserting document separator sheets?
  • Skilled scanner operators scanning boxes of paper documents on big expensive scanners in a central capture facility?
  • Quality control operators and specialized document index operators reviewing and processing high volumes of documents prior to having the documents stored in a central enterprise content management system?

If these are the sort of things that come to mind, your stereotype or perspective of document capture is similar to the majority of the people out there. The majority of the customers I visit are primarily using capture for the purposes of back office, production batch capture. Traditionally, the  majority of the capture opportunities I get involved with are initially thinking about employing capture to archive paper documents.

While document archiving (typically called “scan to archive”) is important, it doesn’t usually have as significant return on investment as people would like. Its primary driver for purchase is based around retention, either from the perspective of shared access or regulatory adherence.

In today’s economic environment, we find customers making purchase decisions based on these key drivers:

1) Cost reduction or cost containment

2) Gains in operational efficiency

3) Gains in customer satisfaction and retention

4) Gains in internal process situational awareness,

5) And last but not least, risk mitigation from a regulatory standpoint.

When augmenting these purchase drivers, we see an overall push to minimize – or even eliminate -- paper as quickly as possible. We’ll be diving in to the motivation factors for truncating paper in future blogs…but for now, know that most of, if not all organizations that we interact with are:

1) Attempting to reach out to the furthest reaches of their enterprise and truncate paper as quickly and as remotely as possible

2) Moving to a self service paradigm relative to validating the integrity of the metadata (e.g., index data) associated with the inbound content.

The result of these dynamics has created a new and compelling relationship between workflow automation systems and intelligent capture solutions. Intelligent capture being the on-ramp for on-boarding business critical content into your workflow infrastructure and processes.

I’ll dedicate some future blogs to diving into the evolution and transition that is occurring within the capture industry and the change in perspective that customers are going through relative to the use of and benefits associated with intelligent capture.

Capture is moving (in the enterprise space) from being an after the fact, centralized and batch oriented (document archiving) process to being the tip of the spear, in a highly decentralized, transaction-oriented environment that is initiating and feeding main stream business processes.

It’s an exciting and compelling phase of the industry’s evolution and a great time for customers to realize real, hard dollar savings to their bottom line.



#batch #businessdrivers #ScanningandCapture #Scanning #Document
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