by Tom Beasley

Most business executives would agree that information is power … but only if it is accessible and current. The only way to keep it current is by processing and delivering it electronically and in real time. What it comes down to is this: electronic information delivery is no longer a choice for most businesses. It's an imperative fueled by the expectations and demands of both internal and external audiences, and the ongoing need to minimize operational costs. The real choice, however, lies in the level of process automation needed.

In this issue of The AccuView, we introduce you to a new document routing feature in EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender, an electronic document management application employed in the vast majority of AccuImage-installed document and information management solutions. The new document routing feature enables ApplicationXtender users to automate the flow of information by routing documents to other users for review and/or approval - sans process design, programming or scripting skills.

While process automation can benefit all businesses, for small to mid-sized companies, a full-blown workflow or business process management solution may not be the answer. For ApplicationXtender users, the new document routing capability presents an entry-level solution for automatically routing documents within your existing document management application.

We have also included a couple of articles in this issue that further demonstrate how process-oriented improvements, like electronic document routing, can prove beneficial to organizations in search of accelerated business processes, cost reduction, risk management, etc.

Can the document routing capability within ApplicationXtender improve your business processes? Contact us to discuss how to implement and use this exciting new feature.

Warm regards,
Tom Beasley
tom.beasley@accuimagellc.com

Automate the flow of information and documents throughout your organization, making your business more effective and responsive. EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender Document Routing allows participants to collaborate on work with easy access to ad-hoc workflows via Microsoft Windows or web-based EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender clients.

Users can route documents to other users for review/approval. Requires no process design, programming or scripting skills.

Enable workflow between your business users.

With ApplicationXtender 5.3, EMC Documentum has introduced a new feature - document routing - that enables users to easily route documents to other users for review and approval. This can be accomplished by end users themselves, with no need for programming, scripting or use of ApplicationXtender Process Builder.

End users can sequentially or concurrently route documents to multiple individuals, immediately enhancing operational efficiency and lowering processing costs.

ApplicationXtender's document routing feature also allows for migration to EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender Workflow as an organization's workflow needs grow over time.

The document routing business process …

The document routing business process enables a user to submit a document to one or more reviewers either sequentially (one at a time) or concurrently (all at one time) for review and/or approval. Business users are able to specify the reviewers as well as the order in which they will receive the document. Each reviewer has the option to review the document and subsequently endorse or reject it. Additionally, each reviewer has the ability to add a supporting document(s) for the remaining reviewers in the sequence. For documents submitted concurrently, each reviewer is tasked with reviewing the document by the due date set by the originating user.

Once all the reviewers have acted on the item, a notification is automatically generated for the business process initiator. This notification will indicate who approved the document, who rejected the document, and who didn't review it at all. The notification is sent to either the initiator's Workbox Inbox or through an e-mail message (if mail is configured), depending on the configuration of the business process instance.

To purchase ApplicationXtender or upgrade your existing version, call 615.242.7226.

Content and Related Business Requirements

Industry experts agree that unstructured content is doubling in volume annually. This includes documents and forms (both physical and electronic), spreadsheets, presentations, e-mails, instant messages, rich media files and more. Analysts estimate that unstructured content typically makes up 80 percent of business information.

Content is often subject to little or no control and scattered over many file servers and individual computers throughout the enterprise. In this silo environment, it can be difficult or impossible to find or access specific content. Without proper management of changes and document versions, employees can't be certain that they have the latest or most up-to-date information. This lack of control and inability to find content is particularly disturbing in view of the increasingly high risk posed by requirements for regulatory compliance and legal discovery.

Content management is often viewed in terms of these daunting, and growing, problems. It is also helpful to look at it in terms of content-related business drivers:

• Accelerate or streamline business processes
• Reduce costs - for lines of business and for IT
• Manage business and legal risks
• Comply with regulations, e.g. SOX, HIPAA

In an analogy to driving a donkey with a stick while enticing it with a carrot, regulatory compliance is the stick - and is a major content management driver itself. According to a recent AMR Research report, to comply with external mandates and internal policies and procedures, organizations worldwide will spend $27.3 billion in 2006, $8.8 billion of which will be on technology - and this doesn't show signs of decreasing anytime soon.

Continuing the analogy, cost savings and more efficient business processes represent the carrot for driving content management initiatives. In the above research report, 75 percent of organizations surveyed indicated that they would use investments for compliance to support other business activities, and streamlining of business processes topped the list of benefits sought.

It's useful to bear in mind that most content is generated and used in conjunction with business processes and departmental/group projects or activities, so there is a business context within which specific content is relevant. Understanding this business process context is essential to proper organization, categorization and attribution of myriad content types in a content management system, and is the key to leveraging content in everyday business operations.

Achieving Success with ECM

Enterprise content management (ECM) has evolved from early initiatives to manage documents in highly regulated environments such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace industries. Today's ECM technology offers broad, extensive and highly specialized functionality capable of addressing any content management requirement.

To achieve true enterprise-wide adoption, it is essential to integrate the content management technology seamlessly into business processes and applications so that content can be accessed and shared by the appropriate people. This enables individuals and teams to collaborate around content naturally in the context of the business process, without the necessity to stop what they're doing and switch context to enter a different application environment or third-party collaboration application. Providing knowledge workers with the ability to access and collaborate on content from familiar application environments is key.

Contact us today at 615.242.7226 for a complementary consultation and needs analysis.

Source: KMWorld, Stephen L. Garth, April 26, 2006

Business Challenges with Paper-Based Manual Document Processing

Any company that processes a large amount of documents faces common business challenges. The most frequently encountered challenges include:

• Compliance and litigation risk
• Slow response time and customer dissatisfaction
• Data inaccessibility and storage costs
• Manual processes and operational bottlenecks

These challenges can negatively affect a business if they are not addressed. Thus, leveraging technologies that minimize manual paper processes is of paramount importance for the benefit of corporate governance initiatives, compliance efforts and improving customer perceptions.

Compliance and Litigation Risk

Compliance and litigation risk minimization is of the utmost importance for organizations needing to comply with regulations ranging from HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), to GLB (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) and SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley). However, full adherence to regulations is clearly at risk in companies with a heavy reliance on paper-dependent and manual processes.

With each manual or procedural error, the potential to violate regulations increases, as does the possibility of litigation, government fines and government remedial action. Taking a "business-as-usual" approach is not only contrary to good business practices, but also goes against compliance and corporate governance improvement efforts.

Slow Response Time and Customer Dissatisfaction

Frost & Sullivan has observed that manual, paper-based processes can cost up to 22 times more than computer-assisted, electronic document processing. Furthermore, eliminating manual processes can reduce a process, such as mortgage credit approval, from 4 hours to 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, paper-based manual processes are common for some business areas where the high volume and variety of documents is enormous and is further complicated by the fact that many different people and functions need access to the same information.

For organizations that rely on manual paper processes, it can take days or even weeks to respond to customer inquiries and requests. Customers perceive the company as unresponsive or negligent, when in fact it's just difficult and time-consuming to access the right information. The fact is that relying on manual processes frequently results in procedural bottlenecks that negatively impact the customer experience, customer loyalty and repeat business. These bottlenecks not only adversely impact the customer experience, but also directly contribute to lower productivity and higher operational expense.

Data Inaccessibility and Storage Costs

Another challenge of paper-based processes associated with critical business areas is the inability to promptly access documents that are stored offsite or in disparate storage rooms within the organization. Even in organizations that no longer store physical copies of documents, it is not unusual for imaging and storage processes to place documents in multiple repositories, making information retrieval difficult and time-consuming. If information is migrated offline to optical or tape storage, documents can be unavailable for days at a time, creating a problem as bad as paper-based document storage. Further, when information resides in multiple databases, content repositories and storage infrastructures, or in numerous onsite and offsite storage facilities, the organization will encounter operational problems including:

• Slow response times
• Cost overruns
• Productivity loss
• Inability to comply with regulations

Manual Processes and Operational Bottlenecks

One of the facts of doing business in a paper-based system is that manual processes inevitably create operational bottlenecks that negatively impact company profits. The bottlenecks themselves are caused by a variety of reasons including:

• Inability of management to accurately balance workloads
• Lost paperwork and/or illegible facsimiles
• Misdirected paperwork
• Inaccurate paperwork that forces a process to start over
• Employee vacation, illness or resignation

Regardless of whether that company has one large bottleneck or several small ones, processing time for paperwork can increase from minutes to hours or from days to weeks. The result is increased costs and an inability to respond quickly in the market, beat competitors or meet customer expectations. In today's business environment, accepting manual processes and their inevitable bottlenecks will enable competitors to take more market share and marginalize any company unwilling to automate business process management.

The Business Need for a Document and Image Processing Solution

In comparison to previous generations of image processing systems, today's technology enables not only standard document imaging of paper documents, but also allows the customer to enter data on an electronic form and submit it online or print it out and fax it into the document and image processing system. This permits a wide variety of information to be captured more efficiently and enables companies to improve critical business processes. Today's leading document and imaging process solutions allow you to:

• Decrease the amount of paper to be printed, copied, handled, marked up and saved
• Increase the efficiency and accuracy of index information (data about the data)
• Significantly reduce the incidence of lost paperwork
• Support compliance efforts by more centrally managing data and documents
• Provide faster processing time by automating business processes

Today's best document and image processing solutions automate and streamline business processes with integrated features capable of eliminating bottlenecks and decreasing operational costs. Features such as efficient automated routing of information to appropriate people, automated re-routing of information in cases of illness, vacation or resignation, and workload balancing that alerts management of developing process bottlenecks ensure accelerated processing speeds and lower overall costs. When combined with the ability to always provide the right access to the right information, true business evolution is possible.

EMC Documentum: Bridging the Paper and Digital Divide

It is clear that paper-intensive businesses can benefit from a modern document and image processing system that bridges the gap between paper and electronic documents. Because it is impossible to eliminate all paper documents, unlike traditional legacy systems, EMC Documentum enables organizations to work equally with scanned documents, electronic files, digital assets, records and images. EMC Documentum has bridged the paper and digital worlds by offering robust capture capabilities for paper documents, electronic files, large print reports and electronic forms; sophisticated processing capabilities; and robust records management.

In light of the continuing pressure to focus on compliance, corporate governance initiatives related to cost reduction and productivity enhancement are occasionally sacrificed. With EMC technology, however, compliance and corporate governance enhancements are possible to achieve in tandem, making the EMC Documentum solution important to consider for cost-conscious businesses.

Source: "A Business Case for Document and Image Processing," A Frost & Sullivan White Paper, Sponsored by EMC Documentum

AccuImage, LLC is a systems integrator that empowers their customers with solutions designed to gain the maximum value from their information at every point in the information lifecycle. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, AccuImage specializes in the design, installation and support of document and content management systems, forms processing solutions, and electronic workflow systems. The company offers hardware and software from leading companies - AnyDoc Software, Böwe Bell+Howell, Canon, Captaris, Captovation, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kodak, Kofax, Panasonic, Plasmon and Verity - as well as consulting, document conversion and professional services.

* Limited time offer. AccuImage may discontinue the offer at any time without prior notice. Offer available only to current and new subscribers to The AccuView. No purchase necessary. Following the two-hour complementary consultation, additional consulting is available at AccuImage's regular professional services rates. Consultation may be conducted in person or over the phone, depending on location. Call for additional details.