British Waterways gets onboard with document capture and sees instant ROI

Kofax offers the broadest suite of SharePoint enabled capture products on the market, supporting business processes and archives from the enterprise level all the way down to the individual desktop.

Enterpise organisations can create a complete environment for document based business processes and archives at the enterprise, departmental and desktop level. They can automatically capture content in any format, from any device or location, and deliver it to a variety of Microsoft applications.

Extracting the appropriate information from varied content sources Kofax solutions enable organisations to then deliver it to ERP, CRM and line of business systems. They can then automate the straight-through processing of data and business decisions based on new information as it is received and captured.

Scanning and capture to Microsoft SharePoint and transactional content management provides a robust total offering to organisations proving an end-to-end solution.

Customers in a wide variety of industries have reduced time and cost in their enterprise content management (ECM) environments by implementing Kofax solutions with SharePoint.

With its improved capabilities for document management, records management and workflow Microsoft SharePoint is creating a growing demand for solutions that can automatically capture, transform and deliver documents and data into SharePoint.

British Waterways in on example of such an organisation delivering measurable return on investment across distributed sites.

British Waterways Saves $15 Million Annually with Combined Kofax and SharePoint Solution

Document Capture and Microsoft Records Management System Enables Documents to be Captured, Archived and Retrieved Easily and Efficiently

The situation

British Waterways is responsible for protecting and maintaining approximately 2,200 miles of canals, rivers and waterways in England, Scotland and Wales. With more than 2,000 employees, British Waterways is the third largest proprietor of listed structures in the U.K. and owns more than 2,750 monuments, bridges, historic parks, heritage sites and battlefields. It also maintains more than 350 miles of conservation areas and 90 reservoirs.

As part of its charter, the company ensures waterways are safe and accessible for more than 13 million people who visit annually as well as more than 33,000 boats that operate in the waterways daily.

The challenge of relocation

British Waterways recently chose to relocate its headquarters to a corporate office located in Watford. Due to the physical limitations of the new corporate office, sufficient storage space was scarce. A massive volume of paper records - boat licences, renewal forms and related documents - was being stored in 100 large filing cabinets and growing each day. With its available storage space declining, the company was looking for a solution to cost-effectively archive its large backlog of paper documents and electronically capture, archive and retrieve documents at a moment's notice.

In addition, many employees were relocated to multiple offices throughout the U.K. and needed quick access to customer documentation. However, with the company's records department based in Watford and its licensing and administrative departments based in Leeds, employees were unable to locate documents efficiently, which was hampering their ability to deliver prompt customer service.

Automating the solution

British Waterways turned to Kofax to implement a business process automation solution that would address each of its challenges. The company contacted Deltascheme Limited, a local Kofax Certified Solution Provider, to integrate the solution. Deltascheme implemented Kofax Capture, the industry's leading document capture software and VirtualReScan (VRS), the de facto standard for capture productivity and quality throughout a document's lifecycle.

Kofax Capture accelerates business processes by scanning documents and forms, transforming them into accurate, retrievable electronic information, and delivering them into business process applications, databases and content management systems. Whether the information is on paper or in electronic files, or located in a central office or on desktops and remote offices throughout the world, Kofax's proven document capture software helps users capture it all quickly and accurately.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was also integrated as the document management repository, which seamlessly integrates with Kofax Capture.

The combined solution serves as a robust platform for capturing, processing and archiving mission-critical, transactional business information.

Microsoft's SharePoint Server represents a state-of-the-art business collaboration platform for British Waterways, empowering users to connect with each other, respond rapidly to business needs and cut costs with a unified infrastructure. Combined with Kofax Capture's powerful document capture capabilities, British Waterways SharePoint Server users are able to manage and control documents throughout the information lifecycle, and easily share, distribute, store and access information.

The combination of Kofax Capture and Microsoft SharePoint delivers a powerful platform to British Waterways that enables unparalleled document capture, processing and accessibility capabilities.  This can be replicated for a wide range of customers across many different industries.  Kofax Capture greatly complements the features and functionality in SharePoint Server and helps deliver accelerated productivity and collaboration across the applications people know and use every day.

Reaping the benefits

The combined Kofax and Microsoft solution has enabled British Waterways to save more than $15 million annually in document and records management costs and realise vast improvements in its efficiency and productivity. The agency's documents are now centrally stored, easily retrievable and accurately labelled. The solution has been rolled out to 11 sites across the UK.

As a result, British Waterways has significantly increased its productivity and efficiency, and enabled its employees to retrieve documents in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours or days, regardless of their physical location. In addition, nearly 350,000 TIFF files have been converted into PDFs, which has greatly reduced the amount of time required for staff to manually locate and review each file.

"The Kofax solution is extremely cost effective and easy to use," said Keith Lester, Project Manager at British Waterways. "It is important for us to be able to quickly access and retrieve key pieces of vital information from a wide variety of documents, and the combined Kofax and Microsoft solution enables us to do so in a fast, accurate manner. Plus, we can now search for individual words and text within each scanned document, which makes document retrieval quicker and more efficient."