Are you ready to digitize your files, but don’t have the time or resources to perform an OCR conversion in-house?  With over 20 years of experience in document capture and content management technologies, DCA can assist you every step of the way to convert your paper files into usable data for your business with OCR document scanning services.

Whether your company is looking for a one-time back file conversion or for an on-going scanning project, DCA’s team of imaging experts can assist from design to implementation.  DCA provides production level scanning hardware and OCR software, as well as a team of scanner operators who are managed by DCA staff to prepare and scan your documents.  DCA provides secure access to the images and data generated through our OCR software or by integrating with your existing line-of-business systems.  The end result is efficient and secure access to the data that is essential to performing your core business functions.

One of DCA’s long-time customers, Pfizer, Inc. utilized DCA’s OCR document scanning services after their acquisition of Wyeth Corporation, which incited an urgent need to transition the company’s patent, trademark and litigation documents.  Leveraging DCA staff and equipment, 8 million documents were securely converted into searchable electronic files in less than six months.  DCA’s solution eliminated the need for any of Pfizer’s documents to be moved from their existing file room.  In addition, Pfizer’s data never left their network during the entire conversion, assuring the highest level of data security.

“The scope and speed of this operation was simply amazing,” said Carmen Lantigua, Pfizer Director – IP Global Services. “We went from bidding the project to start-up in just four weeks. DCA completed the initiative on-time and under budget despite several roadblocks we threw at them along the way!”

New York-based Pfizer is a diversified, global health care company dedicated to the discovery, development and manufacturing of medicines, vaccines and nutritional products for people and animals.  Pfizer works across developed and emerging markets to advance wellness, prevention, treatments and cures that challenge the most feared diseases of our time.

Document Conversion Associates, Inc. (DCA) has been an international leader in mission-critical content management solutions since 1991. Featuring world-class document imaging hardware and software and proven information management processes, DCA serves the world’s largest companies, governments, and educational institutions with integrated document imaging, forms processing, and content management solutions.

For more information on OCR Document Scanning Services, please contact DCA at info@dcainfo.com or (908) 735-0393 ext 110.

There are countless benefits to implementing a business process management project, including increased business flexibility, efficiency and profitability. But in order to achieve these goals, it is imperative that your ECM strategy is well developed before any technology is deployed.  Here are some tips to creating a successful BPA project:

• Create awareness and gain support for your ECM initiative.  Be sure to engage all stakeholders in the process as early as possible, especially the end users.  Those who are close to the process can give insight into what is working and what isn’t.  Routine business processes often aren’t optimized due to the use of old methods that were never updated to evolve with the growing business.

• Be prepared and be realistic.  Before you invest in technology, allot the appropriate amount of time and resources to the project.  You will need sufficient time for analysis, planning, testing and improvement.  Be sure to identify goals that are attainable with your timeline, budget and other resources available and communicate these goals often.  With realistic goals in mind, staff will stay motivated to gain the desired results.

• “Think enterprise”.  Even if you are focused on improving a single department or business area, consider the opportunities in all of the areas within your business where the data you collect has strategic value.

• Continuously evaluate and improve the process.  Your business is constantly evolving, and so are the technologies that support it.  Evaluate your processes periodically and modify as necessary to stay in line with broader enterprise goals.

For more on ECM strategies, please contact a DCA representative at (908) 735-0393 or contact us online.

For many years we have heard the mantra of going paperless.  And while you may see the words “paper-free” and think “tree hugger,” the reasons to participate are linked to hard business benefits, not saving trees.  Business organizations of all sizes and industries of all types have sought to minimize their paper use and reduce costs and carbon footprint while at the same time increasing operating efficiencies and profitability.

Join DCA and organizations around the world for one day as we discuss how to automate manual processes (that’s removing the paper) in order to make work run more smoothly.  If you remove the inefficiency paper creates in your organization; you WILL save and/or make more money.  And, yes, it is good for the environment.  Those are two reasons anyone can support.

The final Thursday of October; commit to:

• Not printing anything
• Look into a business process or technology that can cut the paper waste in your office
• Participate or produce a local Paper-free Day

This is no small task and it requires not only the proper use of technology but also change.  Change in our Ways of Working (WoW) and change in our corporate culture.  It requires change in the way we think.  This is perhaps the hardest challenge of all.  Going paperless and the change required to get there.  DCA would love to hear YOUR thoughts on the paperless agenda form your experience.  Tweet us your thoughts @DCASolutions or contact us at info@dcainfo.com.

Resources: www.aiim.org/paper-free-day

World Paper Free Day is an initiative by AIIM international to create awareness for the advantages of electronic information management to save paper.  AIIM is a non-profit association dedicated to nurturing, growing and supporting the information management and social business community.

Electronic Forms Processing

Nearly all organizations rely on forms in some area of their business.  Whether it is human resources managing payroll or a university processing student applications, forms allow organizations to collect specific information to serve key business functions.  Nevertheless, paper forms have certain limitations; they are vulnerable to damage, being lost, misplaced, altered or forged.  Moreover, paper forms are tedious and slow to process due to redundancy of information, version control, approval routing and the input of data into business systems.  Advanced technology provides a better solution to managing forms with the creation of electronic forms, or e-forms.

An e-form is a computer program version of a paper form.  Aside from eliminating the cost of printing, storing, and distributing pre-printed forms, e-forms accelerate processes because they can automatically format, calculate, look up, and validate information for the user against existing databases. Compared to paper forms, e-forms allow more focus on the business process or underlying problem for which they are designed by streamlining workflow. Digital signatures and routing via e-mail can significantly reduce approval cycle times. With electronic submission of completed forms, you can also eliminate the cost of rekeying data and the associated errors.

DCA is a leader in implementing secure e-forms solutions for both public and internal forms processing. DCA provides solutions to quickly capture, verify, approve and integrate data with existing enterprise systems, while ensuring that the data collected is secured, validated, protected, and archived against possible loss or damage. To learn more about streamlining critical business processes with electronic forms, please call DCA at (908) 735-0393 Ext. 110 or contact us online.

Accounts Payable is gaining more and more momentum as a strategic function within enterprises. With pressures to increase visibility, compliance and efficiency while cutting costs, many have taken advantage of technology to streamline AP processes.

The Aberdeen Group recently conducted a study of over 150 companies to uncover best practices in Accounts Payable among the “best-in-class”.  They discovered that the cost to process an invoice for the average enterprise was almost four times the cost of best -in-class enterprises.  Additionally, cycle times were nearly four times longer. So what are the best-in-class doing to set themselves apart?

To start, the participants identified a need to evaluate current AP operations to eliminate bottlenecks and standardize policies for the receipt and workflow of invoices. It is important to quantify the associated time and cost to manually process paper invoices and to reallocate these resources to areas of more strategic value.  This upfront effort will lay the groundwork for smoother automation implementation down the line.

Document capture and workflow technologies with automated approval routing have proven a significant ROI by reducing cycle times, lowering transaction processing costs and eliminating manual data entry.  This enables AP staff to better manage supplier relationships by eliminating potential errors and providing real time tracking of invoices in the procure-to-pay cycle. Choosing the right technology not only addresses performance goals, it also enables finance managers to monitor organizational performance for financial reporting and budgeting.  To complete the solution, it is important to integrate AP processes with existing ERP systems.

For more information on how AP automation solutions can add strategic value to your organization, please contact DCA.

Many times we hear management asking us to find ways to “work smarter.”  But that can be difficult to do without having the right technology to back it up. Without some investment in automation technology, the whole idea of “working smarter” will only result in frustrated employees.

Automated, intelligent scanning software, like Kofax capture, can dramatically reduce employee workload while cutting costs in the process. Two companies – a hospital and an insurance company – used Kofax capture solutions to achieve just that:

Hospital

A hospital had recently implemented an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution to improve operational processes. However, the processing of supplier invoices remained a manual procedure. This labor-intensive process included registering the invoice in the ERP system and then obtaining a number of approvals before the invoice could be paid.

The hospital installed a Kofax solution to automate the process. Now, invoices are scanned at a central location, the Kofax software extracts the relevant data and cross-checks it with the ERP accounting system and the approver receives notification via e-mail to start the approval process.

The hospital estimates a 30 percent cost savings per invoice.

Insurance company

Kofax technology helped a Japanese insurance company improve its tedious workflow involving the manual review of forms at numerous levels, manual data entry and lengthy company distribution process. A new process was implemented using Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange to scan, recognize, validate, verify and release the documents throughout the company. And, because the solution included Kofax Virtual ReScan, the quality of the documents was ensured throughout the process.

Thanks to this solution, the insurance company decreased the amount of time it takes from document origination to accessibility on the system from five days to two or three days. This solution has also freed up worker tasks, allowing them to focus on other duties.

DCA’s Kofax capture software can help you make an incredible impact on your company’s business processes and pocketbook without sacrificing quality in the process. DCA’s team is skilled in developing a Kofax solution that will help you achieve the results you’re after. To get the conversation started, call us 908-236-6505 ext. 110 or contact us online.

The Healthcare Billing and Management Association reports that the frequency of overpayments, rejections, and denials on medical claims often reaches 50%, primarily due to manual data entry errors and the high complexity of claims. The main challenge of claims form processing is manual data entry, which creates a bottleneck at the front end of the process, delaying payments and increasing per-claim processing costs.  This issue can be addressed by the introduction of a front-end capture system, which minimizes manual keying of data, resulting in improved productivity, data accuracy, customer service, and profits, all while cutting costs.

Due to the high volume of data fields found in medical claims forms, the per-claim processing cost can reach up to four dollars per claim with manual methods.  With robust OCR technology, capture systems are able to achieve high automatic extraction rates to ensure that data is always found correctly on the form and verified for accuracy.  Capturing information from CMS-1500 and UB-04 paper forms allows health insurers to accelerate the processing of claim forms and supporting documents, and the delivery of that information to business systems and content repositories.

Once information is extracted from a claim form, customized business rules are automatically applied to validate the information according to data format and field content requirements outlined by the American Medical Association (AMA).  Information relating to medical treatments is also verified against AMA Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code databases, and patient data is verified against the insurer’s existing customer database.  Because the information contained in these database records may frequently change or need to be updated, it can be difficult for operators to know if they are using the most current information. An automated lookup ensures that data is current and accurate.  Verified data is then delivered to a back-end content management system, and workflow can be applied for use in analysis, reporting, and retrieval.

Automated processing of CMS-1500 and UB-04 paper claim forms can significantly reduce operational costs and eliminate 80% of payment errors during data entry. For more information on how to lower labor expenses, improve data accuracy and increase turnaround times in claims processing, please call (908) 735-0393 ext. 110 or contact us online.

Improving technology has made recognition software more user-friendly, efficient and cost effective.  As scanning and capture technologies become more widely utilized across organizations, it is important to evaluate the various strategies of capture.  Outsourced scanning, centralized in-house scanning and distributed scanning each have proven benefits as well as drawbacks.

A 2010 independent study by AIIM evaluates the decision criteria of a selection of 65,000 respondents when deciding which capture strategy to implement.  They found a significant increase in the preference for both centralized and distributed capture, and only a small increase in outsourced scanning.

The study shows that larger organizations were more likely to outsource scanning, with 55% of large companies outsourcing as compared to 32% of midsized and 22% of smaller organizations.  The primary driver for outsourced scanning is reduced cost, followed by the desire to keep the workforce focused on core tasks.  An impressive 88% of respondents were satisfied with the service provided by their outsourcer.

Centralized in-house scanning was preferred when security and physical transportation of documents was a concern.  Issues with this model can be limited storage space and logistical requirements.  Centralized scanning may yield better quality entry and indexing due to the greater process knowledge of in-house staff.

When working across multiple locations or departments, distributed scanning often delivers the greatest benefit.  Rather than shipping documents to a central location for imaging, departmental scanners and MFP’s may be utilized by remote staff to capture documents. This sometimes presents a quality control issue, as training is often limited due to the larger number of scanner operators.

DCA is a provider of both on-site and off-site scanning services and has a proven track record of maintaining the highest level of security, confidentiality, and professionalism.   Our years of conversion experience in some of the most heavily regulated environments have yielded an offering to conversion services that should address virtually any client concerns.  Our scanning associates are made up of dedicated professionals who can quickly set-up a high-speed, client specific scanning environment to meet the specified goals and budgets to just about any project. For more information, please call DCA at (908) 236-6505 Ext. 110 or contact us online.

For the complete AIIM study, please click here.

Kofax Solution Allows Employees of Singapore’s Largest Law Firm to Send and Receive Faxes from their Desktop Computers

The Situation
Founded in 1902, Allen & Gledhill has grown from a colonial partnership of two to become the largest law firm in Singapore with over 250 lawyers. The focus of the organization is to provide a premier legal service to a wide range of clients from all industries.

Over the years, the firm has received numerous accolades and awards from respected legal publications and directories. Allen & Gledhill is the only law firm in Singapore which is consistently ranked at the top of league tables for every major area of practice, including financial services, corporate & commercial, intellectual property & technology, litigation & dispute resolution and corporate real estate.

The Challenge
Allen & Gledhill regularly looks at new opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce overhead. As with all legal firms, the amount of paperwork involved in daily business processes is tremendous. With the number of users and the wide variety of messages involved, including faxes, paper documents, physical mail and emails, what the firm needed was a powerful technology solution to efficiently manage the inflow and outflow of information and data. Processing faxes efficiently and accurately was especially important to Allen & Gledhill since they are legally-binding documents and are useful for signatures.

The company also wanted a solution that would integrate with their existing technology investments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, a messaging and collaboration software, and Cisco Gateway, which delivers connectivity services to high-bandwidth users.

The Solution
Allen & Gledhill selected Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange, the foundation for Kofax’s strategy to help organizations streamline business processes, to unify the wide variety of messages received on a single platform.

The Kofax business process solutions included:
Kofax Capture, the world’s leading automated information capture platform and
Kofax Communication Server, which coordinates and performs the automated exchange of information by integrating inbound and outbound communication channels

The Results