Are documents drowning your business?

By Thomas Senger

Global business has never been more competitive. In areas such as banking, insurance and utilities where deregulation in many countries has opened the door to cheap offshore providers, the glut of supply has put price pressure on providers. But customers still expect the highest levels of service or they take their business elsewhere – helping customers to find the best deals and switch providers is now a business in itself. Add to this the cost pressure exerted on businesses to aggressively market their capabilities and to address internal issues such as control and regulatory compliance it’s no surprise that many are feeling overwhelmed.

Many businesses have identified the handling of incoming documents from customers and suppliers as a key area of cost and risk to their business. Documents such as application forms, letters, invoices and sales orders flood through the door in mailbags, on fax machines and into email boxes every day and they all must be dealt with promptly and efficiently to keep the business moving and the customers happy. 

Paper documents present a particular challenge - they are easy to lose, hard to trace and it's difficult to distribute them effectively without incurring costs and increasing security risk. But hold on. Weren't we supposed to all go 'paperless' about 20 years ago? Clearly this has not happened yet and it's not going to happen soon either - according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, there are over 4 trillion paper documents in the US alone and they are growing at a rate of 22 percent per year.

To alleviate the problems that document handling presents and stay competitive, industry leaders are investing in enterprise document and data capture solutions that enable them to efficiently ingest all incoming documents and efficiently convert them to actionable business data using scanning and recognition technologies.

Automating capture is often a key element of a wider business process automation initiative. Businesses can invest in electronic workflow to formalise their processes, to deliver data to the right person at the right time and to trigger outbound communication to a customer, but until the information is in the system nothing happens - no customers served, no sales orders fulfilled, no invoices paid. And that's where capture steps in.

Businesses that invest in enterprise capture achieve fast delivery of high-quality information to people, processes and systems, increasing the speed and agility at which they do business. Because every document is converted to a digital format as soon as it is received, access to documents is easier to control so data security is improved, reducing the risk of fines for compliance failure. And the icing on the cake - labour costs are substantially reduced because there's a vast reduction in manual document handling and data entry. 

The resulting ROI, typically achieved in less than a year, makes investing in enterprise capture one of the easiest business decisions that business executives will ever have to make. The growth in the market for capture is evidence of this - the global market for capture to feed a business process is growing at just shy of 10 percent Y-o-Y and the trend is set to continue.

Renowned English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase the 'survival of the fittest' in the 19^th century. Now take a look at the way your business handles documents in 2010 - are you fit to survive?

About

Thomas S. Senger is Kofax´s Senior Vice President of Applications Software & Services EMEA. Senger oversees all customer-facing sales and services functions in alignment with the company's newly-introduced hybrid go-to-market model, which supports both direct customer engagements and indirect sales through channel and with alliances partners.

Enterprise capture delivers three key capabilities:

1. The ability to capture documents and data at the point of receipt - in branch offices or at head office possibly in a central mailroom - regardless of whether the document is delivered in the mail or through a fax machine or via email - and regardless of whether it's an application form, an item of correspondence, a sales order, an invoice or any other document type.

2. Automatic transformation of the documents into process-ready information, using automatic document classification to determine the document type and enable automatic routing through electronic workflow, and automatic data recognition to extract the necessary information to feed a business process.

3. Delivery of documents and data to workflows and business processes, for example to an invoice approval workflow within SAP or a customer on-boarding process within a banking application, and also to Enterprise Content Management systems for storage and archiving.