Capture Moves to the Head of the Class

Seems sensible enough. But there is still a kink or two I need to work out. The current nature of many common business processes—take insurance claims as an example—practically demands that they be all-electronic. If you want to be competitive with the accident claims management portion of your insurance business, you want people in the street with digital cameras and laptop computers. A paper process doesn’t cut it anymore.

"That doesn’t mean the mailroom is going away, though," cautions Toni. "Corporations still receive a large volume of paper documents. But the best practice is to scan, identify and extract information from those with little human interaction. The trend I see," continues Toni, "is toward a ‘digital mailroom,’ where documents are identified, captured and sent out to the correct business processes."

And she’s right. "Digital mailroom"—besides being a good name for a rock band1—has become more than just another well-worn buzzword. Still, Chris looks at it a little differently, without quite managing to disagree with Toni at the same time (tricky stunt, that). "A hybrid solution makes the conversion component most cost-effective," says Chris. "Image-on-demand, for example, makes sense in a credit-card receipt application, where 99% of the time, those receipts are never viewed. They only become important when the purchaser disputes the purchase. And it’s really expensive to image 100% of your documents when you only view 1%," reasons Chris.

"Another example is called ‘abstracting.’ You have a mortgage application with 10 important pages and 90 pages of boilerplate. Or a medical chart, with a few important pages and a lot of stuff you don’t need to look at. You can convert the critical information in these examples, and keep 90% of it in physical form. Much less expensive," Chris says.

I don’t think Toni and Chris have mutually exclusive ideas. They both start with the premise that the conversion of paper to digital form is not only desirable, but these days downright necessary. There are few arenas in information management where you can enjoy the best of both worlds, but I’d say document capture is one. It is applied with equal vigor to reduce operational costs while simultaneously creating an asset of great business value.

"Whether capture is aimed at saving money or making money...depends," agrees Toni. "In loan or mortgage processing, it’s definitely about deriving the revenue. In financial services and insurance, the competitive advantage of speeding up the processes—and they tend to be front-end processes that benefit here—is definitely a big driver. In invoice processing, you’re doing both: saving money in terms of productivity while making a little by taking advantage of (fast-pay) discounts," says Toni.

This spectrum of possible business justifications has occurred, reckons Toni, pretty much organically (although she quickly adds that executive support and communication play a strong part). "A lot of our customers invested in capture to address a specific problem—say, claims or insurance processing. But once it was established, they moved to a sort of ‘shared service’ model, leveraging scanning and BPM in additional departments. They used one application to get understanding and get the foundation set, then they leveraged those best practices into other departments," she says. "It’s human nature: If you give people a tool they like that makes them more productive, they talk about it at the water cooler."

She adds: "Looking back, our customers’ biggest problem at the time was that they were buried in paper. Now, a lot of them have that under control and they can look around for the big picture and realize the opportunities."

Spreading the Word
There’s been a lot of toner under the bridge since document scanning was considered exotic and restricted to only the largest insurance and financial services operations. As steadily as document capture has become embedded into mission-critical business functions, so has it inched into the corporate zeitgeist. Hard to imagine some businesses existing without it. Distributed capture is a prime example of that curve; MFPs, common in many offices, have become the point of entry for document capture that illustrates, perfectly, the evolutionary path that document capture has followed. Harvey’s study reports that the "ad hoc capture" portion of the market (a segment which probably didn’t exist two years ago) is driven by the adoption of MFPs into scanning and has—in relative terms—outstripped the rest of the capture market by growing at 19% over its previous year.

Toni attributes these growth indicators, in large part, to the unavoidable benefits that can be easily cross-pollinated...if there’s an opportunity for the various "silo managers" to get together. "It’s all about constant communication. We facilitate ‘software days’ at our customers’ locations. Various departments get together and share information about the advantages and benefits they’ve discovered in THEIR jobs, and are eager to spread the word."

It’s been a long time since I felt genuinely excited to look at document capture and forms processing in a KMWorld White Paper. I knew the promise of image data capture, workflow, business processing and document lifecycle management had legs a long time ago. It has taken a while, but the participants in this paper "get it" too, and I am hopeful that reading their contributions will facilitate YOUR "data capture" as well.

Their approaches may be different; they may emphasize one benefit over another, but (as with Chris and Toni) there is an underlying unified vibe throughout these articles: No matter what you call it—document capture; forms processing; imaging—document scanning has become part of the information management landscape. Get used to it.

1 Apologies to Dave Barry