It’s ironic that a large percentage of paper documents being processed by today’s organizations don’t arrive via the traditional postal mail services. Rather, they typically originate in an electronic format.    

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) recently reported that 30 percent of invoices that enter an organization arrive as PDF attachments, and 15 percent as faxed documents. In addition, 77 percent of the invoices that originate as PDF attachments are printed.

Employees responsible for processing invoices typically print those that are received via email. While it may seem strange that emailed invoices are printed, many organizations feel it is the simplest way for the finance or accounts payable department to process them.

Moreover, while a faxed document is typically thought of as a paper document, it does in fact reside in electronic format before it is printed. AIIM also reports that 31 percent of faxed invoices are printed and then re-scanned before being processed further. Naturally, this tedious, back-and-forth process of converting digital documents to paper format is expensive, inefficient, prone to error and, in many cases, can wreak havoc on an organization’s ability to capture and manage information critical to the business while maintaining a positive customer experience. 

Capture solutions provide a single, consistent automation solution for all media types (email, fax, file shares, web services, XML and other electronic data streams) that captures, classifies, separates, extracts and validates the data prior to delivering it to the downstream business process.

This automation delivers many benefits, including shorter processing times, less manual data entry (and fewer errors as a result) and better control of document chain of custody. Even better, the time required to understand and decide what to do with the information is drastically reduced with a minimal need for human intervention throughout the process. 

Take a look at your organization’s business processes and the methods that your employees employ to manage the flow of information throughout the enterprise. With automation comes better management of information and, in turn, a better customer experience.

The delivery of products and services to customers in a timely, efficient manner is core to business vitality, operational efficiency and customer relationship management. This approach requires core operational processes that integrate with a varied system landscape. With that in mind, the list of products in the typical large enterprise is diverse and will typically include ERP, CRM, order to cash, supply chain optimization, ECM and other applications. 

That’s why I find it particularly tiresome when an ECM supplier asserts that their stuff should be at the center of the universe and is the best solution for the problem. For example, a customer service representative will typically need to know what a customer purchased, if the product or solution is under warranty, what the past service record is, if a recall on any components exists and if the customer in good standing…yes, it goes on and on.  And that information is found in multiple business systems and applications, not just in documents.

Capture Enabled BPM gets strong endorsement from customers and analysts because they acknowledge that capture is an enterprise requirement – automating the capture of all types of inbound information and using a single, consistent process to discover the information required for the downstream systems and processes, deliver it to them in its purest form with the fewest human touches, and kick off the appropriate phase of the process. It’s not at the center of the process, it starts at the beginning…and it IS the process.

Organizations operate under constant internal and external pressure to better control and manage many factors that directly influence productivity and profitability.  In today’s economic climate, the desire to gain control over operations, reduce risk and improve productivity is driving organizations to seek solutions that effectively automate their core business processes.

 Over the past decade, most companies have invested heavily in automating their back office operations by implementing ERP, CRM, ECM and Enterprise Capture solutions. With the mandate to “do more with less,” companies have squeezed every bit of efficiency out of the back office as they possibly can.

To automate business processes, it’s necessary to rethink how information enters, is used and flows throughout the organization and, equally as important, how internal resources are engaged in the capture process. The faster you can get information captured and aligned with your business processes, the faster the information can be leveraged.   

So what do we mean by Point of Origination™?  In essence, the Point of Origination strategy accelerates the migration of capture from centralized, back office environments to the “point of origination” where customer interactions actually occur in order to reduce process latency and improve customer service. 

Moreover, Point of Origination solutions enable your customers, partners and employees to use a variety of common devices, such as smartphones, tablet computers, multi-function peripherals (MFPs), desktop scanners and internet portals, to capture content and data that business applications use to automate processes.

Information is automatically extracted from captured content and fed to downstream business processes while significantly reducing  – and in some cases eliminating – human or manual intervention, thereby creating a “touchless” process.   With less manual intervention comes less time required to understand and decide what to do with the captured information. 

There are many applications that best illustrate the benefits of Point of Origination.  Here are a few modern day examples that illustrate how information is captured and initiating business processes.

As part of completing a mortgage application online, a banking customer may receive an email from a bank stating they are pre-approved for a loan, but must submit additional information to receive final approval.  Clicking the link in the email will typically redirect the customer to a secure page on the bank’s customer self-service portal, where one can upload files or scan paper documents directly into the portal. After selecting the appropriate documents, each can be scanned and uploaded to a personal loan file, along with other personal identification information (i.e., social security number, driver’s license number). 

Front office workers, including insurance agents, are often responsible for initiating and administering customer insurance claims directly (often electronically) within a front office environment.  Even though the claim may be completed electronically, additional information (i.e., vehicle registration, repair estimates, police reports) is often collected in paper format directly from a customer at the office location.  In this scenario, an MFP device is used to create a digital file for a claim, allowing the agent to scan the respective documents and assign them to the customer’s case.  

Remote field workers are often required to capture information away from a home office or place of business and can use smartphones and other mobile devices to initiate business processes directly from those devices at the earliest point in the process. 

For example, consider a retail transaction at a mall kiosk for the purchase of a new mobile phone service.   Once a customer contract is completed at a kiosk, the employee could use the Mobile Capture application on the device to capture and transmit an image of the customer contract and supporting documentation to a central office to initiate a new account opening process.

In each of these cases, the user has been able capture information directly at the source, whether it’s from a branch office, a personal residence or in the field.  Point of Origination extends the proven capabilities and quick ROI of capture to the front office and beyond – enabling faster processes, improved efficiency and better interaction with customers.

The world is changing. Emerging technologies, continuing economic uncertainty and evolving demographics are transforming the social, political and commercial landscape for organizations of all sizes, across all sectors.  Businesses are standing on the edge of a precipice overlooking new opportunities and risks. We can either leap forward and embrace the change, or stand still and do nothing.  If we leap, we need a metaphorical parachute and in our scenario this parachute is a robust business process management system that can keep operations going yet adapt rapidly to meet changing needs.

First of all, there is the much hyped concept of big data.  Just when we all thought we had gained control of the terabytes and gigabytes coming in to and moving around our organizations, along comes a deluge of data unprecedented in terms of volume, velocity and variety.  ‘Big data’ offers immense potential for intelligent decision making and business growth, but without the right business processes in place to capture, integrate, clean, analyze and validate the data, it will remain essentially valueless.

Where is all this data coming from?  Essentially, there are five main sources, not all of them new. There is mobile data, including such things as location-based data and sales transactions. There are digital images, video and multimedia, which now account for the majority of internet traffic and are critical to industries such as medicine, education, entertainment, transport and other public services.  There is the so-called ‘internet of things’ where machines communicate with other machines, for example in package tracking.  Then there is social networking, with its millions of unstructured, informal conversations that generate staggering amounts of data.  Businesses ignore social media at their peril: it has been described as a gigantic, real-time CRM system, constantly revealing new trends and opportunities. Then last, but not least, there are the traditional sources of data generated by normal business operations and the mountains of unstructured text, such as documents and emails, created every day.  Turning all this passive data into active information requires powerful BPM.

We believe that the place to seize control of data is before it hits the business, as far out towards the operational perimeter as possible.  Ideally this should happen at the point of origination, whether this is a mobile phone, a tablet or a PC.  This is where the ‘capture’ part of Capture Enabled BPM really comes into its own as it can take the data from the point of origination and transport it into business workflows.

Studies suggest that many businesses feel unprepared to handle big data.  It’s a field surrounded by myth and confusion, and this can cloud the very real and very urgent need to ensure business processes are ready to deal with high-velocity, constantly changing data forms and growing customer demands for multi-channel access and real-time customer service.

The second business trend is continued global and economic turbulence.  Across the world, markets continue to be unstable and unpredictable.  The emergence or sudden loss of market opportunities, rising global competition, increasingly stringent legislation, natural disaster and even cyber-threats, all have the potential to disrupt business operations.  Companies need flexibility and agility to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances, make faster and better-informed decisions and protect customers and business operations.  All of this relies heavily on high quality and responsive BPM systems.

BPM is vitally important when it comes to meeting the challenges of big data and economic change.  There are other trends that represent a challenge for BPM.  One of these is the often overlooked issue of demographic change.

 The baby boom generation is starting to retire, and a wealth of accrued knowledge and expertise is leaving with it.  This trend will continue and accelerate unless we find ways of harnessing that knowledge and feeding it back into the business. ‘Knowledge management’ technologies can help, but the real challenge to business processes, particularly in areas such as case management, comes from the loss of tacit knowledge such as insight, judgement and wisdom.  This is a people not an IT issue and should be handled as such.

At the other end of the scale, young professionals entering the workplace are demanding to work in a way that is flexible, mobile, collaborative and technology-enabled.  This requires increasingly open and fluid business processes.

Albert Einstein is famous for saying “I never think of the future, it comes soon enough”. The above trends are already transforming the way companies operate and will continue to do so.  Integrated, automated and agile business processes will be increasingly essential in helping organizations to harness the potential of change.

The time to act is now.

For over a decade, I’ve been surprised to see many enterprise content management (ECM) professionals making a very expensive mistake. It’s not that they don’t clearly understand the technology or methodology of implementing ECM solutions; it’s that they dedicate the lion’s share of focus to search, retrieval, collaboration and workflow. Each is an important component of an ECM application, but a bigger problem should be addressed – and the benefits of taking action will continue to yield results for years to come. An expensive mistake in enterprise content management, of course, is failing to recognize the real value of capture.

At its core, ECM is all about removing the friction between people, information and process. In many organizations, this friction will take the shape of manual data entry or document classification processes, and in those instances, the biggest return on investment can be found through capture. Whether it’s typing information from insurance forms, keying information from invoices into an ERP application, or auditing the various documents of a mortgage loan, friction is slowing down business processes and creating additional costs.

Taking extra time to focus and invest in capture, however, allows companies to automate manual data entry and enables workers to focus on higher value tasks. With capture we remove the friction between information and action.  Data can be immediately extracted from paper, email, PDF and other formats.  Emails can be immediately classified and data can be obtained and routed for instant response. Reactive customer support can be transitioned to proactive customer care, all while reducing the costs of processing. In effect, the process limits human or manual intervention and becomes “touchless,” thereby improving the overall business process and reducing latency. 

Moreover, the benefits of capture are even further exemplified when it is moved to the beginning of a business process and initiates it at the point of origination.  With this approach, capture enables process ready documents to be ingested directly into the business process, resulting in more efficient and accurate document throughput and less human involvement in content classification, indexing or other tasks. 

Regardless of where you are in the process – whether you’re just starting to research ECM or a seasoned professional – invest more time and resources in capture. A little more time spent at the point of origination, the place where content first enters your organization, can create more savings than you ever expected further downstream in the process.

Remember, if you’re not investing enough focus in capture, the clickety-clack of the keyboard may as well be the sound of money being flushed down a drain.

 We recently had the privilege of being joined by William Band, Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst and a leading expert on Customer Relationship Management & Business Process Management to talk about empowering employees and transforming customer service. The discussion was born out of the imperative for organizations to gain competitive advantage by delivering great customer service and improving business processes.

Below are some of questions which William answered from the “Empowering Employees and Transforming Customer Service” webinar:

Kofax:  Is it possible to perform case management within CRM applications?

William Band, Forrester:  The simple answer is yes. Many CRM applications have scripting capabilities, forward tasks on, assign tasks to others in order to resolve, they have tactical case management capabilities, but have limited opportunities to design business processes, (also likely to be linked to an existing BPM technology). But, in total, it’s not as robust as a full BPM and case management suite.

Kofax:  Is it risky to empower employees?

William Band, Forrester:   Again, the short answer is yes. Businesses don’t want the interaction of employees with important customers left to the total discretion of employees. Currently, they have service level agreements to meet and have constraints placed on what they can do. So, there is risk in empowering employees. But there is even greater risk in customer dissatisfaction.

Kofax:  So the benefits as such outweigh the risks.

William Band, Forrester:  And the way to manage them is by creating process definitions, policies and guidelines.

Kofax:  Why have organizations been slow to empower employees?

William Band, Forrester:  In many customer services environments, the imperative is to process high volumes of calls or inquiries and have specific, structured processes. Companies often have highly production-oriented, rigid processes to help manage the risks. This deals with 80 percent of most cases, but it is the 20 percent that lead to customer dissatisfaction.

Kofax:  Will empowerment of employees require a cultural change?

William Band, Forrester:  Yes it will. They need to move away from a production line approach, the way to change is through the right incentives, training, and decisions in hiring the right people.

Kofax:  In our experience, long-term, cultural change is important and one indicative example of the importance of customer satisfaction is UK supermarket giant “ Sainsbury’s,” who merged their customer service department and HR departments together.

For addition information on the Webinar “Empowering Employees and Transforming Customer Service” led by William Band and Peter Whibley, Product Marketing Manager at Kofax, please contact Garreth McCullagh, Communication Manager, Kofax.

Mobile capture was top of mind for the duration of Transform 2012 (hashtag #Transform2012), especially in the wake of Tuesday’s General Session, where CTO Anthony Macciola and CMO Martyn Christian described Kofax Mobile Capture and how it will extend Capture Enabled BPM to smartphones, tablet PCs and other mobile devices.  As Macciola and Christian described onstage, the solution will enable a user to intiate business processes at the point of origination by using the camera on the device to capture information from documents and subsequently use a mobile app to route the resulting digital information to a variety of applications, workflows or content repositories.

Macciola covered a few examples of those applications especially suited for mobile capture, including transportation and logistics, and insurance claims processing.  He also walked the audience through the mobile app for capture which will use Kofax VRS to image-perfect a document just as it would from a desktop application.  The app will be available for both iOS and Android devices.

An interactive customer and industry expert panel immediately followed with representatives from UK based Ecclesiastical Insurance Group, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and Forrester Research.  NARA’s Kofax solution was a particularly noteworthy example of the software in-action; Marcus Most, Director of Business Development at NARA, said his organization currently captures and processes approximately 1 billion pages annually consisting of nearly 750 different document types. 

All in all, a great event.  A special thanks goes out to all of the Kofax customers and partners for their participation at Transform 2012 and for making it a huge success year after year.

Kofax Mobile Capture - CTO Anthony Macciola and CMO Martyn Christian

Customer and Industry Expert Panel - Kofax Transform 2012

by Dan Talbot, Sr. Communications Manager, Kofax

Perhaps it was Craig Le Clair, VP and and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, who may have put it best during his keynote on Monday at Kofax Transform 2012 when he said, “It’s time to change our process approach.”  It’s a line that really sums up his presentation and perhaps the tone of the overall conference thus far.  In Le Clair’s words, it is the increasing velocity of business, the changing workforce, consumer technology, and geopolitical and economic issues that create a host of intersecting demands on today’s businesses that suggest a move to align BPM practices with the vast amount of information and content flowing into the enterprise.

To an audience of hundreds of Kofax customers and partners, Le Clair made the point that to better manage that information and garner real value from it, process driven capture starts with harnessing content as soon as it initiates the business process – increasingly from mobile devices and platforms – and it is the captured information that drives the “next best action” in customer focused processes.

Prior to Le Clair, Kofax CEO Reynolds C. Bish provided a General Session presentation of the Kofax corporate, product and market vision and strategy, which included discussion of the recent Singularity acquistion, a move which brings the addition of BPM and dynamic case management capabilities.  According to Bish, the acquisition also doubles the size of Kofax’s addressable market and makes it the first to offer a single Capture Enabled BPM platform.

It was a day full of content and collaboration.  From the BPM related sessions providing best practices for building Capture Enabled BPM solutions to the “Coffee House” roundtables examining the integration of capture and BPM technologies, Transform is like a live business use case of process improvement and discovery.

On Tuesday:  live blog and Twitter coverage (follow hashtag #Transform 2012) of General Session presentations from Kofax Chief Marketing Officer Martyn Christian and Chief Technology Officer Anthony Macciola, as well as the customer expert panel. 

See you there!

By Dan Talbot, Sr. Communications Manager, Kofax

If you ask someone responsible for improving process efficiency and information throughput within today’s typical enterprise about the biggest pain points in their business, it’s rare when the conversation immediately turns to the technical.  Rather, what you will hear first is a common desire to better meet the demands of those they ultimately serve:  the raft of customers with ever-increasing expectations for information and processes that are cleaner, faster and more accurate, all packaged in a way that quickly adapts to constantly evolving industry regulations and business requirements.

 That’s turning out to be a common theme here as well.  Kofax kicked off its annual Transform 2012 event in San Diego on March 11 for its customers and partners with three days of breakout sessions and workshops all centered around BPM and, more specifically, Capture Enabled BPM. 

As those familiar with a typical business process management scenario can tell you, the management of documents and processes will begin in one department and then migrate to another, often involving multiple constituents who must first understand the information before deciding where and how the information should be routed, regardless if its ultimate destination is another department, application or repository.  In most cases, the information (and those responsible for overseeing it) is often bottlenecked by largely manual, tedious processes and multiple layers of oversight and review, which results in process latency.

A key benefit of Capture Enabled BPM is its capacity to effectively remove or significantly shorten such a bottleneck, and thereby deliver more meaningful value from both the infomation and the underlying business process.  Following Kofax’s recent acquisition of BPM and dynamic case management solution provider Singularity, Transform is a culmination for Kofax customers and partners looking to learn how to fully automate the downstream business process and optimize business productivity.

Leading off the General Session keynote presentation is Craig Le Clair, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, with a session titled “Process 2020: The Role of Capture and Dynamic Case Management,” which will discuss how critical, “untamed” processes will affect your organization and what you can do about them, along with a look at the forces shaping the new world of work and our approach to business processes.

Stay tuned for coverage of Le Clair’s keynote and more on March 12!

Kofax Transform 2012...Beautiful Venue, Beautiful City

Kofax Transform Exhibit Hall--More than 600 attendees over 3 days

Bad implementations, false positives, slow implementations – sound familiar? If you’re familiar with the document
capture industry you could say these are buzzwords that describe many early implementations. Fortunately the situation
is taking a turn for the better.

Document capture is a dynamic industry that is on the cutting-edge of going mainstream.

Hardware and software enhancements have created a nirvana that will benefit both customers and solution providers. Let’s take a look at where we’re heading with document capture.

Decentralized scanning will continue to grow

No matter how hard we try to contain scanning in a centralized mailroom, the concept of scanning remotely is here to
stay. The reasons why are very clear.

• Hardware prices have plummeted. You can now purchase a reliable scanner for the cost of a printer.
• Multifunction devices are now usable. For years, multifunction devices were for printing only. Now the device
is opening up a brand new opportunity that will change the future – the ability to scan. The hardware equipment
has improved its scanning capabilities and the devices are now powered by software that automates document
ingestion.
• Software to capture remote scanning has exponentially improved. In the past, if you didn’t scan with a highquality,
centralized device the image quality would suffer. The hardware has improved, but the improvement
came with the advent of new software capabilities. Image cleanup is now a basic technology available to
everyone.
• Simple features that we take for granted such as image scanning confirmation, hardware integration, and
enterprise solutions are now part of the core repertoire of all high-end, remote scanning applications.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology will be mainstream

OCR technology used to have the stigmatism of having a very high percentage of failed implementations and producing
far too many false reads (identifying a character for another character). If you don’t have the right people implementing
the solution and you do not have a clean ability to deal with exception handling, you will still run into significant
implementation problems even with the best technology.

• Select the right product. There are many products in the market today that can scan and OCR documents. The
key is finding the correct product that meets your needs and is easy to configure and can handle exceptions.
• Ensure you have integration with the core systems to handle lookups. No OCR system is perfect since most of
them utilize the same OCR engines. Consequently, the tool’s ability to link back to the original information to
validate data is crucial to minimizing false reads.
• Have the proper methods to deal with exceptions. The majority of significant issues that can happen after an
OCR system implementation revolve around bad data being uploaded into the legacy system. Consequently,
you must ensure you have the proper method of dealing with exceptions easily.

Separation and classification will exponentially improve

15 years ago a great install would have utilized patch pages, achieved a 90% read rate for machine-printed documents and
70% for hand-printed documents and the forms could not be altered.

This is not the case today. You should now expect dramatic improvements when you implement a separation and
classification solution. Separation is accurately knowing when on document ends and the next document in a batch
begins. Classification accurately identifies the documents in a batch of related documents.

The most significant technical problem we face today is gathering enough samples so the OCR software that reads the
letters and numbers off the document can effectively identify the various document types. This problem will be
minimized in the future by the software only requiring a few samples to identify documents. The end result is a shorter
implementation time measured in weeks, not months, and accuracy will improve to greater than 90%. You will also
reduce preparation time and have no need for patch pages.

Regulation will push capture technology to quickly identify document types

Years ago, records managers spent a majority of their time making sure documents were filed in the correct folders.
Today, records managers are busy providing corporate legal counsel due to government regulation and the increased
awareness of important data.

Companies need a way to quickly identify all different types of data on the fly without the need for a human to review the
results. The competitive landscape will be fierce. Capture technology will be competing with search engines for this
market. The document types that need to be identified vary from scanned documents and electronic documents to
emails. The winner in this space will be corporations establishing a records management policy.

Business Process Management (BPM) will be incorporated with capture

Capture companies are just now integrating BPM technology to capitalize on these benefits.  The benefits are significant in multiple ways.

• Data is far more important to companies today than it was 10 years ago. This trend will continue for years to
come. In certain industries, such as the mortgage space, the process of confirming the quality and accuracy of the
data is vital compared to how lenders processed mortgages 10 years ago.
• Companies are bringing knowledge-level decisions to the capture platform. Instead of waiting until after the
process is completed, companies want to ensure the data is accurate and catch errors prior to processing the
data.
• Standardization of knowledge is documented in the BPM solution. Smart companies are implementing rules into
their capture platform so they can select the good business from the business they would prefer not to have on
their books. Capture integration with BPM gives corporations this flexibility to make quick and accurate
decisions.

Over the next couple of years, we’ll see ECM companies continue to push their capture solutions and the search engine
organizations will enter the market with similar technology. More information will be accurately identified on a real-time
basis. We will all benefit greatly from the improvements since catching errors will improve the quality of our
organizations.