Managing Mission Critical Content

For centuries, business has run on paper. For many industries, that’s still the case. But as the pace of business has accelerated, paper has become a burden and a bottleneck. It slows productivity because only one person can handle a paper document at a time (unless it is copied, which takes more time and further erodes efficiency). In an increasingly stringent regulatory environment, paper is also a legal risk. Having to search for content in response to a legal demand could lead
to costly penalties and lost productivity if a document is lost or missing.

To avoid these and other problems, organizations are streamlining manual, time-consuming processes. The newest trend is the use of digitization and other capture technologies (such as document classification engines, optical character recognition and distributed capture) to integrate information into workflow at the very beginning of the process, as soon as it arrives in the mailroom. Designed for a large range of paper-intensive industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, oil and gas and manufacturing and horizontal processes such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and employee onboarding, these technologies are engineered to convert large volumes of paper documents and other content to digital form and make them available for automated business processes.

The benefits of getting rid of paper can be immediate and dramatic: increased customer responsiveness, reduced cycle time, improved efficiency, lower costs and better compliance. And based on the typical experience of EMC customers—they’ll enjoy a 30% to 50% gain in overall cost and process efficiencies.

The key to utilizing information successfully—rather than being overwhelmed by it—is the ability to efficiently capture and manage large volumes of information from disparate sources. Business-critical information arrives in many forms: paper, fax and a variety of electronic data formats. All of it must be transformed into intelligent content that can feed enterprise applications such as enterprise content management (ECM), business process management (BPM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and other systems.

Often a business faced with these challenges will apply a point solution where it feels the greatest need. Soon there are many point solutions. Then coordinating and integrating several point solutions compounds the original information management problem. The answer to this dilemma is transactional content management (TCM). TCM enables organizations to cope with enormous volumes of information, accelerate information time to value, manage the information from capture to archive and reduce the IT burden of supporting multiple point solutions.

The steps of managing transactional content:
1. CAPTURE: The more customer interactions with mission-critical business applications and supporting documentation that can be captured, managed and stored electronically in a single repository, the more valuable the content becomes and the easier it is to automate business processes.

• Capture: Scanned images may be refined through de-speckling, de-skewing, border removal and other image pre-processing so that "noise" and irrelevant material can be removed or ignored and only transactional content retained.
• Classification: Utilization of text, image and knowledge-based analysis techniques to automatically identify documents and prepare them for processing without the need for manual sorting or separator sheets. Such analysis identifies various document types, such as an appraisal form or a W-2, for example, and enables these documents to be automatically routed in accordance with business rules. Documents are then indexed or "tagged" so they can be easily retrieved from an ECM repository or other systems.
• Extraction: In many cases, data from documents needs to be extracted and made available to users in a variety of other applications. For example, a handwritten new account application might be optically recognized and translated to machine-readable text.
• Validation: Once it has been extracted, data can be validated against line-of-business (LOB) applications to ensure its accuracy and integrity. As an example, an invoice could be compared to business rules to
  ensure all fields have been filled out.
• Export: During the export process, data and documents are made available in the appropriate format—such as PDF, XML or file system—and converted directly for use in Microsoft, Oracle and other databases.
  

2. PROCESS: Once documents have been captured in a content management repository, they can be put to work. The business process management (BPM) system allows automation of human interaction. Steps may include:

• Business rules: Applying business rules via BPM services to automate repetitive tasks that have traditionally been manual processes.
• Queues: Establishing queues where work or tasks can be prioritized and routed or pushed to the correct knowledge worker based on skill level and/or bandwidth.
• Integration: Integrating with LOB applications such as ERP and CRM systems as well Microsoft Office, so additional
  information is made available for correspondence, research and collaboration.
• Compliance: Enforcing records management and retention policies to determine what documents are kept, under what security measures, and for how long.
• Document generation: Merging acquired content with appropriate document output management templates to create highly personalized communications, such as customer service letters.
  

The ideal solution ensures all related transactional content is housed in "virtual files," which contain all relevant documents and content for a single case, file, transaction or customer. Virtual files can be efficiently routed and organized so nothing is lost or ignored. And queue management may be used to automatically route information to the right people so responses to inquiries can be prompt.

3. DELIVER: Managing business files in digital form gives employees the global, on-demand access to content that ensures a 360-degree view of customer data, business transactions and digitized images of the documents.

Once documents are digitized and stored in a single repository, critical data can be easily accessed, allowing employees to search, view and annotate documents so that they can quickly process customer requests.

Having immediate access to information also facilitates collaboration that can improve the speed and quality of decisions and service. Now, all members of a particular case, for instance, have instantaneous access to all the information available as part of the file. Collaboration can also be triggered automatically as part of business processes; for example, corporate officers might be summoned by e-mail to a virtual conference room to review certain claims based on criteria defined in business rules.

In customer service organizations, better access to a holistic view of information leads to better customer satisfaction and