Capture is expanding to embrace all forms of document capture. This is primarily being driven by customers wanting to be able to capture documents in whatever form they come into their organization as it relates to initiating and driving specific business processes.
However, the first time I meet a customer, it’s not that uncommon for them to let me know (almost as a warning) that they want to go fully electronic. I usually end up inferring that they’re not quite sure why they took the meeting with us, since we’re “the scanning guys”!
As you peel back the onion, the heart of these statements is quite interesting. It all started in the late 1990s with the introduction of the Internet. When it started, we watched as organizations began to create portals that were focused on creating interaction with their customers, vendors, partners and employees. At the same time, they began making big investments in enterprise infrastructure focused around routing, monitoring, and processing content. In hindsight, we’ve watched as many organizations have experienced a change in their DNA. They’ve transitioned from a batch -oriented, central processing mindset, to a highly distributed, real-time, transactional mindset.
So why is that important or relevant? As long as a document remains in paper form it’s kind of a black hole. Organizations have to have different policies and procedures to track paper documents, to ensure their security and to prevent loss. However, they lack an awareness of the content contained within the document. It’s a problem most customers want to make go away. To restate their original desire, they want to truncate paper as quickly as possible. If they could, they’d go to the source where the paper was created and capture the document at its electronic source.
As a result, we find customers looking for help as they look to develop a strategy for truncating paper. Fortunately, our capture platform has evolved and can enable paper truncation and can abstract your organization from the various ways you will no doubt need to capture documents as they come into your organization.
Capture isn’t just about scanning anymore. It’s about capturing documents at large, as they come into your central facilities or as they enter your enterprise out in the field. Capture is about allowing you to set up an enterprise capture framework that can federate your various capture inputs while providing you with a central management framework to deploy, configure, and monitor your document capture on-ramp and the integration of the content you’re on-boarding into your enterprise infrastructure.
Next time, we’ll talk a little bit about mobile capture and the impact it’s likely to have on your business over the next 12-18 months.
#ScanningandCapture #OCR #paperless