What About Structured Data? Forms Remain a Challenge

While the ECM world deepens its infatuation with unstructured data, traditional structured forms processing often remains a stubbornly inefficient, labor-intensive process.

Lately, it seems that the topic of unstructured data has dominated the news in our industry. It certainly warrants discussion. More than three-fourths of corporate data resides in letters, contracts, e-mails and other unstructured documents. And replacing manual indexing with automated processes would make it practical to capture far more of this data for business processes and compliance.

The market is beginning to incorporate text-classification technology into capture solutions, but we shouldn’t assume from the current buzz that we’ve squeezed all the inefficiencies from the capture of structured data. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, structured data capture, often called forms processing, remains a complex, labor-intensive process during both development and operation. The resulting cost means that many public and private sector organizations—especially small to medium-sized organizations—still haven’t been able to take advantage of the business process and compliance benefits of getting forms data online.

Remaining Challenges in Forms Processing

Inefficiencies remain in all segments of the process—inefficiencies which recent automation tools could mitigate. Here are a few of the remaining challenges:

Implementation

• Customization. Current forms processing applications typically require substantial customization to achieve customer goals for accuracy and throughput. This takes time, money and a highly specialized consultant. Often, the only solution may be redesigning existing forms to accommodate the software. In many cases, the expense and disruption of business processes may make this impractical.

• Templates. Manually drawing and labeling zones for each form type—or correcting automated results—are often a substantial part of the process. These zones tell the software where to look for data and what type of data to look for, e.g. handwriting or check box.

• Expensive software. This may reflect incorporation of many features that were originally developed for individual customers as customizations but which may not benefit other situations.

Operating Costs

• High operating costs. These reflect the frequent need to key data from scanned images and manually correct automated results. These requirements remain due in part to the limitations in consistently locating areas or zones from which data should be extracted.

• Form separation. Often different forms must be separated by type for scanning. Automated separation would save time and could be a critical enhancement for ASPs and service bureaus which must frequently set up new forms.

• Application maintenance/template revisions. This can result from the natural distortion in scanned images over time and among different scanning devices using the same form template.

Registration: The Achilles Heel of Forms Processing

Accurate, consistent, form registration and the registration and labeling of individual zones are keys to reducing both implementation and operating costs. Here’s why:

• Reprinting forms. Reprinting—or worse, photocopying—shifts data zones.

• Distortion. Even without reprinting, scanners, copiers and fax machines skew, stretch, shrink and/or expand forms.

• New scanners. Form designs last longer than scanners. Each scanner introduces new and unique artifacts.

• Distributed capture. Images from faxes, MFPs and low-end scanners vary—even among different examples of the same device.

• Registration tolerance. Applications often can handle minimal page shift and scaling.

So while taming unstructured content may be the ultimate goal of forms processing, organizations may want to consider enhancements to their structured forms workflow before tackling a whole new set of issues.

Ascent Xtrata: Forms Simplified

Kofax recently introduced an inexpensive forms module for its Ascent information capture platform. Ascent Xtrata addresses the two biggest remaining problems in forms processing: complexity and cost. Specifically, Xtrata is designed to:

• Simplify structured forms processing;

• Reduce implementation time and required skill set;

• Reduce software, implementation and operating costs;

• Reduce internal IT administration and involvement;

• Increase ROI to make forms processing feasible for more small and medium-sized organizations; and

• Provide a simple, cost-effective upgrade to forms processing from document capture applications.

How It Does It

• High-tolerance form registration technology greatly increases the successful automated location of recognition zones;

• Tolerates ±2% shift and scaling, which equals about one quarter of an inch on a letter-size page;

• Automatically classifies new form types to reduce new form preparation;

• Automatically draws recognition zones and determines types of zones without registration marks, anchor points or sample images, greatly simplifying template creation and maintenance;

• Registers zones from overall form features and characteristics;

• Intelligently sets proper anchor points for every zone; and

• Costs as little as 50% of alternative solutions.

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Anthony Macciola joined Kofax in 1990 and is currently Vice President of Marketing and Development. To learn more about how Kofax can improve your information capture processes, call (949) 727-1733, send e-mail to info@kofax.com, or visit Kofax