Paper Forms and BPM: Have Your Cake and Eat It. Too

Embracing Rather than Replacing Paper as an Element of the Way that Business Processes Run Best

Let's face it: Paper isn't going away anytime soon. While both the press and software producers have predicted the "paperless office," the production of printed material continues to increase. Whenever I stay at a hotel, a daily newspaper is placed outside my room each morning (and I read it!). Within our business lives, paper also continues to play a critical role both as a medium by which we can review information and as a vehicle by which we drive business processes. Yes, business processes.

While not as colorful as the screens associated with online transactions, paper forms (as well as formatted documents like contracts, invoices and correspondence) serve as the link between people and the business processes with which they interact. Examples:

Sales order forms filled out by customers are directed to the "sales order processing" group who input the data and initiate a business process that will include inventory checks, credit and payment verification, shipping preferences and product shipment.

Insurance policy application forms collect information from applicants and connect with a "policy approval process" that includes risk review, prior claim history review, service quote generation and the issuance of a policy. In many cases, information collected and passed to the business process may generate the need for more forms to be completed and returned.

Mortgage application forms collect detailed information about every detail of our lives and connect this detail to a "loan origination process" that often includes supporting documentation, usually delivered in paper form, such as bank records and compensation history that becomes part of the process.

In each of these examples, the real goal of both the applicant/customer and the business was to execute the process. Forms play the crucial role of putting critical business information from an individual into the context of the process. So if paper forms are so great, why have we been on a mission to wipe them out?

Misdirected Hate?

Actually, it's not the paper forms that we hate. Rather, it's the costs and risks associated with them that have driven people to look for a magical better way to do things. Some of the negative elements associated with paper forms include:

• Paper forms and documents are expensive to process. The true value of the information is "trapped" until it can be lifted (or manually keyed in traditional "paper-hating" organizations) and connected to processes that consume it. In addition to the cost of manually keying information from forms, there is also significant cost in physically moving paper from place to place.

• Paper forms and documents are expensive to store. Anyone who has ever visited a bank loan processing center or a hospital has seen first-hand the space and people costs that go into physically storing records and retrieving them.

• Paper forms and documents have a tendency to "vaporize." While these items likely never actually disappear, the fact that we can no longer find or access them means they have "virtually vaporized." Depending on when in a business process this loss occurs, it can stop a business process in its tracks, introducing delays, frustration and re-work.

• Paper forms and documents can only be in one place at a time. A bank vice president recently described an internal job transfer process that involved a form moving between four groups as various systems were updated. "It sometimes takes weeks for the whole process to complete," he noted. "And the process never completes if a form gets stuck in someone's in-box."

• You can't track where paper forms and documents are in a process. Once a paper form is completed and submitted, there's often no way to tell which pile of forms it's in, waiting to be processed.

With all of these negatives, it's a wonder that forms survived this long. However, the survival of forms is directly related to the importance of the critical business processes that they fuel and the necessary role that they play.

In many cases there is a need or mandate to have elements of a business process occur using paper. In financial services and insurance, the desire to interact with the broadest possible client-base drives the need to support paper-based input. In government applications, the mandate for "equal citizen access" supports the availability of both paper and online forms.

Many industries still favor paper-and-pen-based "wet signatures" in cases where the value or legal implications of the transaction or process are significant.

In broadly distributed "low-tech" processes (such as the delivery of home healthcare services), paper represents the best vehicle for communicating with the worker as well as for collecting patient signatures confirming that the services were performed.

It's clear from these examples that the real solution is to accept and embrace paper as part of the process, but to convert paper into digital data at the earliest possible point when a paper form is no longer required.

Bringing Power to the People

The first step in the process of blending paper processing with online processes is to convert the paper into digital information. This is a two-step process: Step one is scanning the paper into a digital image; step two is automatically reading the digital image to convert it into business information.

While many people view document scanning as an activity that occurred centrally using a "big iron" scanning device, there is a significant industry trend to have this occur in a distributed manner. One option is to allow people to fax their documents to a central system that can instantly convert the image into data. Another increasingly popular option is to equip remote offices with less expensive scanners and Web browser-based software that can capture, submit and confirm the successful delivery of documents for processing directly over a company's secure VPN or WAN connection. (Systems such as Verity TeleForm® support both of these options in addition to many others).

At the central site, processing solutions can automatically read and validate the information contained in the image to greatly reduce the amount of manpower required to extract the data (handprint, machine-printed text, barcodes, signatures, etc.). These sophisticated systems can read up to 90% of the data automatically with extremely high confidence, while only requiring operators to examine items that were unclear or that failed a business-rule validation. The result is a dramatic reduction in the costs associated with collecting (keying) the data, combined with increases in data accuracy rates.

Once scanned, converted and moved online, data from the form is securely connected to the business process and the image of the original paper document can be digitally "locked" to the online process for instant viewing by anyone who needs access and to ensure the document is never lost.

Don't Throw Out the Baby With the Bath Water

Most people think that doing things a "better way" means doing them in a "completely different way." This is not always the case. During business process re-engineering efforts, much attention is often spent on finding a way to eliminate a paper-based step and motivate process participants to move online. Similarly, many businesses haven't moved to online processes because there was a critical paper-based component somewhere in the process that "had to be done that way."

If it's possible to have steps within a business process occur either in a paper or online