DCA News Blog
Creating business value by automating paper based processes
Posted on 8/31/2010
We recently read an excellent white paper by Sean Baird of EMC and thought we would present to you some of the highlights of this exceptional report.
Although document capture is being used in many organizations to improve business processes, the ability to maximize this value is impeded by two significant challenges:
Too many document types. While many document capture applications focus exclusively on capturing just a few document types, the challenges faced by most organizations require that they capture dozens — if not hundreds — of document types.
Distributed organizations. Documents received at distributed locations are frequently delivered to central mailrooms before they are processed, adding shipping costs and slowing down business processes.
Paper still consumes unnecessary handling time, drives up operational costs, and creates issues for compliance and regulatory obligations.
An example of how document capture can significantly improve a business process is invoice approval and payment. Many accounts payable departments rely upon clerks to enter invoice data into the accounting system. However, organizations are increasingly using advanced capture systems to eliminate nearly all manual data entry, improve data accuracy, free valuable accounting resources, and dramatically speed up invoice processing. AP departments often find that they can reduce the time to process invoices from several weeks down to a few days or less.
Intelligent Enterprise capture extends the value even further:
- By providing the ability to capture from remote offices using desktop scanners or MFPs, organizations can immediately capture invoices wherever they are received, eliminating shipping time and costs.
- Through its ability to automatically identify invoices from different vendors and to intelligently extract invoice data — even invoices from new vendors — AP clerks are able to focus on higher value tasks.
- By providing a consistent method for capturing invoices, organizations make more predictable decisions, understand why decisions were made, and are able to quickly respond to audits.
- Leveraging intelligent document recognition to efficiently extract data not only from high‐volume structured forms but also from a wide range of less‐structured or completely unstructured documents.
A recent AIIM study shows that organizations are increasingly capturing documents in‐house, at least in part because automated data extraction outperforms outsourced data entry.
Organizations that can effectively automate data extraction are able to offer faster, more competitive services, while lowering the costs that limit profits and business agility.
Tags:
automation
emc
document capture
s blog comments powered by Disqus
LinkedIn
Twitter