Keep Information Moving With Intelligent Capture and Exchange

Imagine your business without boundaries: paper and electronic forms merge; you can capture information in any form, from any place; you can exchange information more efficiently to drive business processes, ensure traceability of information and eliminate points of failure as information is managed throughout its lifecycle. Intelligent capture and exchange keeps information, and your business, moving.

The Problem
Information drives business and 80% of all corporate content is unstructured in nature. The volume of information produced is growing at 50% annually.1 On average, a knowledge worker generates about 800MB of content each year.2 At the same time, corporate governance standards require rigorous business practices that ensure the traceability and security of not only paper-based information, but also the countless emails, instant messages and other electronic information that a business sends and receives.

Historically, the processing of these interactions was predominantly a centralized, high volume, batch function; but this is rapidly changing. The sale of distributed capture devices provides an indicator of this changing landscape. In the last three years, unit sales of high-volume scanners have been flat, whereas unit sales of workgroup scanners grew by 80% each year and are expected to grow an additional 40% through 2009.3

Information capture and exchange needs to be tightly coupled with mainstream IT processes. Not surprisingly, information lifecycle management (ILM) has emerged as a discipline to bring together the key elements of content-enabling technologies (such as information capture) and integrate them into business processes. ILM is defined as a "set of policies, processes, practices and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived, through its final disposition."4

The primary value of an integrated approach to intelligent capture and exchange is to reduce the potential points of failure within the discrete processes that support interactions between customers, partners and suppliers. For example, a 25% reduction in error handling cost will represent a 2% improvement in business margin.5 An integrated solution will accelerate business transactions, minimize points of failure and improve ROI by a factor of three.

Document capture issues: Document capture is not as simple as installing a scanner. Historically, document scanning has been a Microsoft Windows-based process involving driver installation and other administrative details. This can turn into a security and configuration management challenge as each user must have administrative access to the associated PCs. Additionally, the scanner vendor must ensure that it continues to update its drivers to support OS upgrades and the user must be mindful that scanner driver updates don’t conflict with the OS in use.

Information classification issues: When information gets captured, it’s often a manual process to validate it, separate it from other content and classify it based on content type or sensitivity. This type of manual process is inefficient, insecure and error-prone. There are many potential points of failure, no built-in security measures and no built-in compliance management. Mistakes made in these areas can destroy a business’ credibility and reputation and result in costly legal fees.

Information exchange issues: Increasingly the greatest source of economic value for many companies is a set of relationships with a core group of powerful, loyal and repeat customers. Frederick Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect and Loyalty Rules, found that loyalty leaders grow, on average, more than twice as fast as the industry average across a wide variety of industries.6 In a recent study, Walker Information found that IT industry leaders outperform "laggards." A survey of more than 4,000 people in September, 2004, found that IT vendors with high customer loyalty generated an average operating margin of 12%, while laggards experienced a negative 11% margin.7

Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange
Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange is the first comprehensive framework to offer a single, end-to-end, auditable, transaction model that provides document capture, routing, management and compliance conformance, from a Web browser. It provides an integrated framework to consolidate and normalize the content at the point it enters your organization.

With Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange, you can achieve the following:

• Implement an automated process to capture content in any paper or electronic format, from any device, from any place, regardless of our deployed desktop platform technology;
• Extract the appropriate information from varied content sources and deliver it to your organization’s existing ERP, CRM and line-of-business systems;
• Proactively notify the proper departments, partners, vendors and customers when critical information is received or when preemptive action is necessary;
• Automate the straight-through-processing of data and business decisions based on new information as it is captured;
• Increase customer satisfaction by providing them with accurate information when they require it, regardless of how that information was captured;
• Reduce errors by eliminating manual, error-prone processes;
• Increase efficiency by implementing automated, information-driven business processes; and
• Transaction-based capture, distribution, routing, classification and validation.

Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange offers a high-level of automation and integration to deliver the following benefits:

• Adapt to the way knowledge workers work by scan-enabling any business application;
• Automate and integrate paper and electronic documents directly into your business process to remove points of failure; and
• Integrate with business-critical applications to reduce risk. 
   

---

To read this full white paper and learn more about Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange, visit www.kofax.com.

1 Gartner, 2006
2 University of California at Berkley, 2003
3 IDC, 2005
4 Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), 2004
5 Internal Kofax Invoice Processing Research, 2006
6 Reichheld, Frederick: The Loyalty Effect, 1996 Bain
& Company, Inc.
7 The Walker Loyalty Report Series, 2004