Maximizing the Value of Capture
Accelerate Your Paper-Based Processes
Over the past couple of decades, one technology that consistently brings strong, reliable value to organizations is document capture. In both departmental and enterprisewide deployments, capturing paper documents has helped organizations reduce the cost of managing and storing paper, while reducing the risk of losing documents, either through filing mistakes or physical loss.
While organizations derive value from their investment in all forms of document capture, the type of implementation that generates the fastest return on investment and the largest long-term benefits is clear: document capture that supports paper-based business processes.
The Liability of Paper
Although it has been predicted for more than 30 years, we are not on the verge of true “paperless offices.” While many of our documents have become electronic, from email to business documents to Web-based forms, studies show that paper consumption has remained constant or is continuing to grow. That means paper cannot be dismissed as yesterday’s problem. In fact, forward-thinking organizations continue to prioritize strategies for proactively managing paper documents and addressing today’s key paper challenges, including:
- Too many document types: While early document capture applications focused exclusively on capturing just a few document types, the challenges faced by most require that they capture dozens of document types in a single department and hundreds across an enterprise.
- Distributed organizations: Documents received at distributed locations are often delivered to central mailrooms before they are processed, adding shipping costs and slowing down the business process.
Paper remains a considerable liability in many organizations today. When you look across paper’s lifecycle, it consumes unnecessary time and effort from too many individuals, it drives up operational costs and it creates issues for compliance and regulatory obligations.
Capture in Action
A useful example of how document capture can significantly improve a business process is invoice approval and payment. Despite recent attempts to move from paper to electronic invoices, paper remains the most common method for companies to communicate with one another.
While enterprises have invested in automated business processes to speed up invoice processing and to automate workflows across the entire organization, paper invoices can only take advantage of these systems once important data on these documents has been extracted.
Many accounts payable departments rely upon clerks to enter invoice data into the accounting system; however, organizations are increasingly using advanced capture systems to automate the capture of paper document, extract business-critical information from the invoice and integrate this data with invoice processing systems.
Successful implementations eliminate nearly all manual data entry, improve data accuracy, free valuable AP resources and dramatically speed up invoice processing. AP departments often find that they can reduce the time to process invoices from several weeks down to a few days or less.
Enterprise capture solutions extend the value even further:
- By providing the ability to capture from remote offices using desktop scanners or multi-function peripherals (MFPs), organizations can immediately capture invoices wherever they are received, eliminating shipping time and costs; and
- Through its ability to automatically identify invoices from different vendors and to intelligently extract invoice data—even invoices from new vendors—AP clerks are able to focus on higher value tasks.
By providing a consistent method for capturing invoices, organizations make more predictable decisions, understand why decisions were made, and are able to quickly respond to audits.
Paper As Business Advantage
Once organizations invest in enterprise capture solutions to address their critical business processes, the results are fast, significant and reliable. In fact, Forrester considers capture “one of the safest ECM investment areas,” adding that “document imaging will continue to deliver strong levels of business success in the form of helping enterprises move from paper-based to electronic-document-centric business processes.”
The value of capturing business documents extends well beyond paper invoices; it addresses the challenges of processing healthcare or property and casualty claims forms, mortgage and consumer loan applications, new account applications and many other types of documents. If there is paper in your business, enterprise capture provides real, measurable value: eliminating the cost to process paper documents and dramatically reducing cycle times. In the end, your paper is no longer a liability; it’s a valuable asset that you can leverage for business advantage.
Find out more about EMC Captiva document capture solutions at www.EMC.com/CaptureConnectGo