What Should You Consider in an Information Capture Solution?

Information capture is typically used in two common business scenarios:

• Archiving: Capturing and saving content after a business process has been completed, typically for shared access or for compliance with regulations; and

• Driving a business process: Capturing business-critical content, extracting key information and delivering it into a business process to initiate or drive that process forward. This content may also be archived.Whether your capture system will be used for just one of these scenarios or both, there are critical factors you should consider up-front when selecting a solution.

Interoperability

Front-end: Your solution should be able to collect content from a wide variety of sources such as scanners, MFPs, e-mail and e-docs. You cannot guarantee how data will come into your organization, and you need a single solution for collecting, abstracting and normalizing the incoming content.

Back-end: Your solution should be able to deliver captured information to a wide variety of business solutions such as ERP systems, CRM systems, enterprise content management systems, corporate databases, workflow systems and a variety of enterprise applications and storage systems.

Transformation

Transformation is the process of extracting information from business documents and forms. The capture solution must be able to process a wide variety of business formats to avoid costly exception cases and workarounds.

Hybrid content: Business content is commonly either structured (the location and type of information are known and well-defined, such is in a tax form), semi-structured (the type of information is known but the location is not, such as in a resume or invoice), or unstructured (both the location and type of information are unknown, such as in e-mail and correspondence). Your solution should be able to transform all three types of content and appropriately handle data streams that combine them.

Classification: Your solution must be able to classify the content being processed (documents, forms, images, folders and so on) to determine the correct rules for extracting and routing the information.

Extraction: Your solution must be able to extract information from a wide variety of business content (forms, documents, e-mails, correspondence and so on).

Separation: Your solution must be able to automatically separate content into logical folders, batches or documents. Otherwise, you may have to manually separate the paper content before capture, often at high labor costs.

Validation: Your solution should enable you to ensure the accuracy of the extracted information, using automated techniques, optimized manual methods or both.

Platform

Enterprise compliance: Many capture providers say they have enterprise-class solutions, but few actually do. Using standard IT definitions, an "enterprise-class" solution must support high availability (clustering and mirroring), adhere to standards (SQL, SSL, COM, SOA, Web services and so on), fully leverage centralized management of report sites, and truly scale (from desktop installations to distributed deployments processing millions of pages per day).

Customizability: The ability to customize the solution to meet your specific needs is crucial, whether through customization of the user interface, import or export capabilities, or the ability to apply business rules throughout the capture process.

Upgradeability: Your solution must enable quick and easy upgrades so you can take advantage of enhancements to the baseline system, even when you have significantly customized your solution. New versions should not require significant resources to install.

Distributed capabilities: Your solution must be able to expand across departments and locations as your capture needs expand. The solution should enable both the secure capture of business content from multiple locations and the distribution of processing. It should also provide robust, centralized management of all remote operations.

Total Cost of Ownership

Many organizations focus on the up-front cost of a solution, but 80% of the cost associated with a capture system is related to ongoing labor. Your solution should automate and drive down the cost of labor for document preparation, manual validation, quality control, set-up and maintenance.

Commitment to innovation: Your provider must be committed to the evolution and enhancement of their solution, keeping it competitive and current with IT trends and maximizing your investment.

Quality of support:

---

With more than 75,000 seats sold across more than 15,000 installations, Kofax has learned a lot about what our customers need from a capture solution and provider. In the past year, Kofax customers have purchased licenses to process more than 8.5 billion images. Our solutions focus on our customers' critical needs:

• The widest range of front- and back-end integration capabilities;

• Transformation capabilities unsurpassed in the industry;

• Platform capabilities untouched by any current competitors;

• Solutions with some of the lowest total cost of ownership models in the industry.

Kofax continues to lead the industry through innovation and a commitment to solving real business problems