Taking Document Capture to the Next Level
Document capture is not a new concept. For the past 20 years, organizations have employed a number of strategies—from keying data from paper documents to basic scanning to eliminate paper storage—in an effort to get rid of their paper. And most organizations that have substantial volumes of paper have implemented some form of solution to reduce the pain of managing paper documents. In recent years, however, forward-looking organizations are deploying intelligent enterprise capture solutions, and in the process, maximizing their benefits.
The benefits of capturing paper documents are clear: reduced paper storage and processing costs, expedited paper document processing, and reduced risk of loss. The cost benefits of document capture can be significant-and often yield a complete and rapid return on investment. By imaging paper documents and storing documents electronically, you eliminate the costs of physically storing documents by either freeing up valuable warehouse storage or eliminating outsourced document storage costs. Even more significantly, barcodes, separator sheets and OCR can automate data capture from documents, eliminating the expensive manual labor that often supports document capture implementations.
Added Value
While cost benefits are significant and very easy to measure, they are only part of how organizations benefit from capturing paper documents. Business processes that rely upon paper documents operate at a completely different pace than electronic business processes. The impact of these slower processes can be crippling: dissatisfied customers, competitive disadvantage and lost opportunities. Worse yet, industry studies show that more than 5% of documents are lost. This risk of lost documents-through misfiling or physical loss-can be the most expensive aspect of physically managing paper documents.
In recent years, organizations have been searching for ways to raise the bar even higher: how can we maximize each of these benefits, wringing out costs throughout the lifecycle of paper documents and eliminating the ways that paper documents slow down businesses in any way. To meet these challenges, a new class of document capture, known as "intelligent document capture," has emerged to address these challenges.
And while intelligent enterprise capture might sound like an elite solution reserved for the largest worldwide corporations, these capabilities address the needs of organizations of all sizes, including individual departments, lines of business or mid-sized organizations. Since they support all needed ways of capturing documents, as well as tools to speed development and deployment, intelligent enterprise capture solutions are perfect to support departmental applications or worldwide enterprise solutions.
Distributing Capture
One of the key limitations to many document capture solutions is the method by which documents are scanned into the capture process in the first place. While most capture implementations provide dedicated, batch scanning support, organizations are increasingly looking for diverse support for documents that do not arrive in the central mailroom. When documents arrive at the desks of front-office workers or in remote offices, intelligent enterprise capture solutions provide distributed capture options that support these situations, from Web-based capture interfaces to built-in support for multifunctional peripherals (MFPs).
But not all documents arrive in paper form. Organizations also receive information through fax or as attachments to email messages, and in most cases, these documents require the same type of processing as paper documents to be used in business processes. For cost, efficiency, and "green" reasons, these documents should not be printed. And intelligent enterprise capture solutions can integrate directly with fax and email servers to capture these documents directly. Once captured, these documents can be processed in exactly the same way as scanned documents.
In practice, document capture is rarely about capturing one—or even just a few—different document types. Organizations encounter documents in many forms, produced by many other parties, including their customers and partners. Dealing with these various document types is one of the key challenges of many existing document capture implementations. They are scanning all of their paper, but they have staffs of employees pre-sorting documents, applying bar code labels and inserting separator sheets.
Intelligent enterprise capture solutions approach this problem differently, applying intelligent document recognition (IDR) technologies to automatically identify documents without the need for bar code labels and separator sheets. IDR technologies can recognize the general pixel densities of a document, key identifiers, including logos, titles and lines, or combinations of words on a page to identify common documents, even when they vary slightly. The result is significantly lower labor requirements and accelerated document processing.
The same type of automation can be applied to extracting important business data from documents. Instead of employing operators or outsourcing data entry, automated data extraction can extend traditional OCR capabilities to extract key data, even from less structured documents. By intelligently identifying key fields using clues, such as data labels, relative positioning and regular expressions, intelligent enterprise capture solutions can dramatically reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of transforming documents into business-ready information, ready to be processed by business applications.
So while document capture might seem like "yesterday's challenge," customers continue to struggle to solve these challenges every day. Intelligent enterprise capture offers advanced technologies that both extend the reach of document capture and enable organizations to achieve new levels of efficiency and cost savings. These best practices allow you to address today's challenges, maximize the return on your capture investment and allow you to focus on growing your business.
Find out more about EMC Captiva document capture solutions at
www.EMC.com/Captiva.