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Capture - without a person?

By Michael Wells posted 08-19-2010 23:01

  

When most people here "capture" they think "Scanner" or "image" - but don't forget there are other methods for "capturing" a document.  We are using a non-traditional method for our recent integration with our new ERP system which I thought might be interesting to some of you.

 

Our new ERP system was designed without much regard for ECM in general.  The vendor has a built-in “document” system which was not acceptable for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with security.  The vendor attempted an integration with our enterprise ECM system with fairly poor results, so for this new phase of ERP implementation we wanted to find a new solution.

 

So, we talked to the VAR for our ECM system about our possibilities and they helped us come up with this new integration.

 

This phase of the ERP handled the Human resources function which, as with most organizations, includes lots of forms.  Our HR department was one of our first adopters of ECM and wanted to continue adding to their existing electronic files from the new system.

 

Working with our in-house developers we found that the ERP system could dump out delimited text files at the end of the HR workflows - the same point that paper would be generated.  This was a good start, though the files were quite ugly and unacceptable for  ECM.

 

We worked with our VAR to develop new workflows in an existing document processing product (Esker Deliveryware) to re-generate images of the forms from those ugly text files, and a connector program to inject these new images into the existing HR documents.

 

And - after lots of tuning and tweaking - it worked!  You’d never know that the images in the ECM system were re-generated from nothing.  Oh, and it’s fast, with most documents appearing within seconds.

 

I’m very pleased that the process worked out in the end, and I hope our users will be as well.  We’ve turned this process over to them for testing, and hopefully I will have lots of good news waiting for me once I return from my vacation.

 

Our new process is capturing without capturing.  



#ScanningandCapture #VAR #Esker #AutomatedCapture #ECM
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