Quality matters: Business Process Outsourcing, powered by Kofax

Today's market is a unique opportunity for BPO providers. The rate of growth and the increasing demand for security and compliance, combined with the increase in competition, mean that a BPO organisation must find and maintain a competitive advantage above and beyond price to best leverage this opportunity. To be successful, BPO providers need a technology platform that allows process innovation, is reusable as well as adaptable so that time-to-revenue can be reduced and the service can be leveraged across multiple clients, regardless of scale.

Outsourcing of document centric business processes can significantly boost the performance of companies and organisations. It can help to increase flexibility and to transform fixed into variable costs. By releasing employees from performing sheer routine tasks and time-consuming administrative processes they are freed up to invest more time in concentrating on the firm's core business, the improvement of customer service and the acquisition of new customers. Last but not least BPO is also a commendable instrument to reduce risks and to improve the overall quality of processes.

Today, and in the light of the fiercely economic climate, it´s probably the cost argument, that predominantly drives more and more companies to outsource fundamental parts of their business processes. In fact, BPO is one of the few industries being barely affected by the economic downturn. Moreover, as BPO is perceived as a remedy to survive the crisis, the annual growth rates remain very healthy. Analysts predict a continuous expansion by roughly 10% whilst estimating the global addressable (not the already utilised) BPO market between $120 and $150 billion.

However, to achieve all the benefits described above, companies should be very diligent when opting for an outsourcing partner in order to avoid specific stumbling blocks that potentially could counter the intended advantages. Besides the necessity to define unambiguous contract terms, service level agreements and a clear procedure how to handle change requests, one of the most important things to be considered is the technology that the potential outsourcing provider utilises.

To put it in a nutshell, the best BPO providers do harness technology as a key enabler of superior process and service quality. And it's this quality aspect that is becoming more and more important, as, on a long-term view, a pure focus on cost reduction will definitely not result in a fruitful relationship between provider and client. For example, a solution for scanning and digital processing of paper invoices might in a first step improve the efficiency of the accounts payable process – but if this solution cannot be seamlessly integrated with a powerful yet easy-to-operate workflow system, approvers within the BPO customer's organisation will definitely experience a poor overall process quality.

It's for precisely this reason, that the BPO industry is evolving from a merely low-cost labor offering to a flexible model for transforming industry-specific processes with targeted and increasingly automated solutions which are suited to deliver scalable, repeatable solutions and best-practice service to their clients.

Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange: The Solution of Choice for Automating Document-Intensive Processes

Kofax, the leading provider of Intelligent Capture & Exchange solutions that automate document-driven business processes by effectively managing the capture, transformation and exchange of business-critical information arising in paper, fax and electronic formats, offers this technology to the BPO industry and to companies in all industry segments.

The Kofax Solution for BPO enables providers to cost-effectively reduce their clients' pain points. This scalable, secure, and transparent solution facilitates meeting and exceeding clients' SLAs. Implementing this solution results in higher confidence and less risk in expanding their BPO relationship as providers demonstrate the ability to meet SLAs consistently.

BPO providers benefit from a world-class solution that delivers:

* A unified global delivery model
* Best-in-class technology
* Lowest total cost of ownership

Providers' clients benefit correspondingly:

* BPO services at a price point that is competitive and offers maximized ROI
* Improvement in data accuracy compared to internal, manual processes
* Easy enterprise system integration
* Maximized data security
* Higher confidence and less risk in expanding their BPO relationship as providers demonstrate the ability to meet SLAs
* Overall cost savings as more BPO services can be trusted to the provider's service organization
* Further reduction in costs as the need to ship paper-based information is reduced
* Faster access to data, regardless of where it is in the process, reducing delays in reaching important business decisions

The Kofax Solution for BPO can process fixed forms, invoices, sales orders, correspondence and virtually any other structured or unstructured document type using the most complete set of classification and extraction technologies available today and allows a seamless integration with over 140 third-party systems, including ECM and ERP.

Its ergonomic data validation ensures that productivity is maintained even on problematic documents. Multi-CPU support and parallel processing means high document volumes can be processed while keeping the hardware footprint under control.

Whilst an extensive suite of predefined UI components for classification and extraction are provided for the most common tasks, powerful scripting capabilities allow complete flexibility to address the most specialised tasks. Validation interfaces can be designed to suit the client's needs or to mimic legacy systems, and user interfaces are fully localisable.

Its Learn-by-example technologies for automating document classification and extraction allow very easy configuration, affordable maintenance and pre-training to provide a high level of performance on day one. The solution can also be retrained on-the-fly using on-line learning to increase performance as documents are processed in production.

All this results in the highest possible level of automation for any document type, ROI usually provided within 12 months.

Typical areas of applications for Kofax enabled BPO:

Purchase-to-Pay and Accounts Payable Automation – extracting all invoice information, including line items, and enabling automatic booking of invoices in the world's leading ERP systems, including SAP, Oracle Financials and JD Edwards.

Sales Order Processing – extracting order data from scanned and faxed purchase orders and validating against catalog databases using fault-tolerant fuzzy matching, reducing the order-to-cash cycle and providing automatic confirmation of order receipt.

Workflow/Mailroom Automation – classifying all incoming documents, including forms and customer correspondence, at the enterprise or departmental level and routing them automatically to the correct queues, improving customer service and retention.

Forms Processing – extracting customer data from application forms, claim forms, loan documents and so on, reducing delays and improving the customer experience.

Equally as important as the solution´s superior technology is the flexible licensing and pricing model, which allows the purchase of only the functions and volumes needed today and thereby offers a simple upgrade path to meet future requirements.

Depending on individual requirements, the solution can be flexibly configured using the following components:

• Kofax Capture, the world's leading information capture platform, automates data capture from scanned paper or imported documents.
• Kofax Transformation Modules streamline the transformation of business documents into structured electronic information by automating the processes of document classification and data extraction.
• Kofax Document Exchange Server enables the capture of documents and data from an organization's remote offices directly into the central Kofax Capture system.
• Kofax Communication Server coordinates and performs the automated exchange of information by integrating inbound and outbound communication channels. It links virtually any device, such as MFPs and phone systems; media types like email, fax, SMS, MMS, voicemail and telex; and applications such as SAP, IBM WebSphere MQ and Kofax Capture products.
• Kofax VirtualReScan (VRS) is the de facto standard for capture productivity and quality throughout a document's lifecycle.
• Kofax Monitor manages, monitors and assesses Kofax Capture operations, including service-level metrics, historical performance data and real-time capture processing status.

By deploying this portfolio BPO providers will have no trouble meeting their customers' expectations regarding lower costs and improved process quality. However, in order to make the solution a real success, clients should not forget one important thing: Though being released from a non-core activity, the ultimate responsibility to the business for the provision of effective and efficient service still remains at the client himself.

Back office processes may be regarded as non- core, but they are also mission critical. If they are not delivered efficiently the business will suffer.

To learn more about Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange please visit: www.kofax.com.