Like a bridge over troubling content
It seems as if you can’t go anywhere these days without hearing about content management. Vendors new to the space are developing exciting products, and established players are releasing remarkably feature-rich versions. But with all that electronic information being so marvelously manipulated, there’s no getting around that paper still rules in a lot of businesses--most transactions are still hard copy.
In Ascent Capture 5, Kofax Image Products thinks it has the answer to both traditional paper conversion and as well as electronic document and XML capture. Says product manager David Oldfield, “Ascent Capture 5 is an evolution and an expansion of what we have always done. In addition to capturing paper documents, we added the ability to bring in other related sources of information, whether it’s a word processing document, e-mail, photos, XML streams or other electronic content.” By accommodating both paper and electronic data, he says, 5.0 facilitates the inevitable transformation from paper-based business processes to electronic alternatives.
An important component of 5.0, Oldfield says, is the ease with which it integrates with enterprise applications. “Kofax has enjoyed great success because our products connect to all the major back-end systems,” he says. “We have what we call release scripts, or integration modules, that are constantly updated, so Ascent Capture can always plug into whatever the archive or content management system of choice. With this release we’re adding that same sort of connectivity technology on the front end of a product that historically we’ve had on the back end.
Another module, the WebValidation Server, extends the Ascent application to be used by people equipped by with nothing more than a PC and a browser. “If you set up a particular kind of document class to be validated remotely, the system will spread documents across the available operators. They can perform validation just as if they would traditionally.
Oldfield cites a 60-office brokerage firm as an example of how Ascent Capture can benefit an enterprise. He says it was wrestling with the issues and expenses of taking new account applications in those branches, making copies of the forms and, perhaps, stock certificates and initial checks or deposits. The branch office would FedEx that material to the central office, where new account processing activities occurred.
The FedEx costs were substantial, and once the documents got to the central office it was unpredictable how long it was going to take for the account to be open. Sometimes, the material was simply lost, he says. “The branches accepted that it was going to be 30 days before they could be sure everything had been sorted out and could get an accurate view of the customer’s account.”
The firm went to a process whereby they captured the information remotely using scanners and Ascent Capture Internet Server (now in version 5.0 ) at the central office. It cut the time to open a new account from an average of 12 days to a day-and-a half. The firm was then bought by PaineWebber, which has 450 offices--and the exact same “black hole” problem. Now, PaineWebber is introducing the same kind of system at all its offices.
“PaineWebber will continue to have these branch office, paper-based projects going on, but they’re at the forefront of converting to an electronic system. Ascent Capture 5.0 gives all the offices the bridge -- it let’s them continue to operate remote scanning to a central system, and they can use the same system to connect to Web-based account processes,” Oldfield explains.