Capture the moment

Business Management sits down with Thomas S. Senger of Kofax to discover the tangible benefits of enterprise capture.

How would you describe the concept of enterprise capture?
Thomas S. Senger. Document capture has evolved far beyond its roots in simply scanning to archives. In parallel, traditional centralised capture processes or fragmented capture implementations within large enterprises, where localised departmental solutions have been focusing on specific types of documents, turn out to be a thing of the past. Today, we see a growing trend towards combining basic document capture with data capture at the earliest possible moment: right then, when documents of all formats are initially received in an organisations multiple contact points in order to feed and initiate transactional and time-sensitive business processes. This combination of document capture and data capture in distributed environments is what is called "enterprise capture". It's a solution approach, that is literally exploding in all transaction-heavy industries like the financial services sector with its hundreds of thousands of payables, receivables and claims that need to be processed on a daily base.

Where do you see the main benefits of this approach?
TS. The key advantage of taking an enterprise approach to document capture is the ability to immediately deliver extracted and transformed data directly into business systems. Moving from "scan-to-archive" to "scan-to-process" has profoundly changed the strategic importance of capture as an enterprise standard. The resulting increase of speed, productivity and accuracy translates directly into competitive advantages. By capturing business-critical data at this early stage and by feeding the won information into an enterprise's various backend systems, employees in all departments have immediate access to this data and can initiate the respective business case as soon as possible. At the same time, document preparation and transportation costs associated with capture get reduced significantly. Besides these benefits related to efficiency, compliance is also a driver for enterprise capture adoption. Operating a common capture platform helps to facilitate records management and e-discovery processes, documents can be controlled more efficiently.

What should companies take into account when they plan to invest into an enterprise capture solution?
TS. The first step in establishing an enterprise-based approach to document capture is to carefully review the types and formats of information that is entering an organisation. Wherever paper-based information is present, both front-office and back-office operations should have ready access to document scanning tools rated for their peak volumes. Ease-of-use is critical for front-office staff to ensure that converting paper to electronic form becomes routine. A clear understanding of what data is needed by various business processes will help when selecting the right classification and extraction tools that can be used to further automate manual handling and reduce bottlenecks. It's important to have each department in a transactional workflow represented when making these decisions, as information that is critical to one area may be of little significance to another department. However, the key question probably is: is the new system affordable and can it provide a good return on investment?

Kofax has become the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions. What specifically makes Kofax enterprise level solutions such successful?
TS. Well, because we can answer all the questions above with yes. With now over 20 years' experience dedicated solely to document capture, we are able to provide a single, unified platform for enterprise capture which strictly adheres to a scalable, standards-based, consistent architecture that easily integrates with the largest variety of existing systems. Our solutions deliver a ROI typically within the first 12 months – an argument that gets even more convincing in the fierce economic climate we're facing these days.

Thomas S. Senger is Kofax's SVP 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.