by Tom Beasley

Welcome to another issue of The AccuView!

This month's issue focuses on human resources and includes information on technology tools you can use to support your HR department's hiring, terminating and routine processes.

I would like, however, to start by sharing news about our new hires. AccuImage is growing again, and I am pleased to introduce you to IT industry sales veteran John E. Fox, who has been brought on board as our new director of sales. We have also established a presence in the Knoxville area, where we will be able to work more closely with our customers located in eastern Tennessee. In his role as director of sales, John will oversee sales operations in our Nashville headquarters and in our new Knoxville location. More information about the newest members of our sales team can be found in this issue of The AccuView.

You are welcome to begin contacting John directly via e-mail at john.fox@accuimagellc.com or by calling 615.242.7226. Please join me in welcoming John to the AccuImage team!

Warm regards,

Tom Beasley
tom.beasley@accuimagellc.com

AccuImage announced this week that it has established a presence in Knoxville, Tenn., and expanded its sales force. IT industry sales veteran John E. Fox has been brought on board as AccuImage's director of sales; in this role, he will oversee sales operations in the company's Nashville headquarters and its new office in Knoxville, Tenn.

AccuImage is celebrating its tenth year in business in 2006, although their roots date back to 1974 with the founding of American Micrographics. In 1996, AccuImage was founded on the premise that PC-accessible images were the wave of the future for document retention and accessibility. Over the past decade, AccuImage has grown to be a provider of comprehensive information management and business productivity improvement solutions. They work closely with customers in diverse industries to design, develop, integrate and support solutions that solve complex business problems, using next-generation document and content management and business process management applications. Successfully competing in an evolving industry, AccuImage has captured a special niche by combining powerful new technology with the real-world experience needed to implement the ideas and vision of their customers.

This realignment as a business process consultancy has, in part, fueled the need to expand the company's operations and bring new sales talent on board. "We have recognized a need for high-level strategic consulting as it relates to identifying business processes, devising a strategy and incorporating technology," said C. Roy Payne, president and CEO. "We are expanding our team to support the entire client relationship from high-level consulting all the way to system integration and support - while providing the very best customer care along the way."

John E. Fox brings over 30 years of professional experience to the AccuImage team. Fox's prior experience includes 24 years at 3M and Imation Corporation. He also has vast experience in records and lifecycle management as well as content management sales. Fox has achieved continued recognition for his ability to help customers in diverse industries solve complex business problems through the use of document management, content management and workflow technologies. Fox is a customer-centric individual and a key member of the AccuImage management team. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Memphis.

Also new to the sales force are John Bybee, who was recently promoted to an account executive role in AccuImage's Nashville headquarters, and new account executive Wayne Ingram, also based in Nashville. Bybee has been a valued member of AccuImage's customer service team since 2004, where he was tasked with customer care, product delivery, inventory management and hardware installation. He holds a bachelor's degree in business. Ingram brings over 30 years of sales experience to the AccuImage team; he consistently received "top producer" and "salesperson of the year" awards from his previous employers. He is an expert at implementing policies and procedures to best serve the needs of the customer.

"Our new sales personnel bring diversity into the team through their varied experiences and areas of technological expertise. We are pleased to welcome John Fox to the team, and have charged him with the responsibility of overseeing our growing sales force, while ensuring the AccuImage name continues to embody customer satisfaction," said Payne. "Over the past two years, John Bybee has proven himself time and again that he is committed to being responsive to customer needs, a trait that serves him well in his new role. And Wayne Ingram's talent for building lasting relationships with customers while looking out for their best interests fits within our mission of providing only the best, in product and service."

As they look ahead to the next decade in business, AccuImage is committed to remaining a cutting-edge consultancy and systems integrator by offering turnkey, proven solutions that maximize business productivity. The growing team remains steadfast in AccuImage's founding mission of delivering first-class strategies and technologies, and the very best customer care.

You think you've got a lot to do? Your HR manager has to find talented people, hire them, train them, and ultimately keep them happy. "What we're seeing is that the role of human resources is shifting to making more strategic contributions," says Kathryn Bartol, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. "Technology is very helpful in allowing human resources to make a more direct bottom-line impact. Also, it's freeing up time so HR can spend more time on non-routine kinds of problems."

In the past, HR applications have been huge systems that relied on proprietary software, which put them out of reach for most small to midsize companies. But the latest web-based offerings are less expensive, easier to set up, and available anywhere.

Once you hire an applicant, there's plenty of routine benefits paperwork to handle. Additionally, HR managers spend a lot of time addressing individual employee requests. Human resources management systems and employee self-service portals cut down on these administrative tasks.

"Time is shifting from handling paperwork to getting data, and having it available to be analyzed as to what that data means for the organization," says the University of Maryland's Bartol, referring to the benefits of these solutions.

Source: Ziff Davis Smart Business

The key to the success of your business starts the minute a manager makes the decision to hire a new employee. The steps that follow are critical to realizing the full potential of that employee's contribution to your company. Armed with a checklist, paper file folders, express mail envelopes and a printer, the processes in most human resources departments touch critical line-of-business systems, regulatory compliance and a company's intellectual capital in a completely ad hoc manner.

Equally important are the decisions and steps required to terminate an employee. The same processes that brought an employee onboard now need to be unwound. Deactivating access to all network and business systems is one challenge. Gartner estimates that most employees leave a company with continuing access to parts of their former company's business for up to six months. And, with enduring peak and seasonal employment swings, ad hoc processes can cost companies huge amounts of money due to the accidental continuance to pay after termination and intellectual and real assets that are not properly retrieved.

Verity: A BPM Solution

Verity brings control, security and visibility into all hiring and terminating processes. Verity's business process management and content capture solutions interact with all the systems and people that are involved in hiring and terminating processes regardless of where they occur.

Enterprises using Verity eProvisioning solutions will …

• Dramatically shrink the hard costs associated with hiring, transferring and terminating employees.
• Accelerate the completion of new and departing employee paperwork.
• Enforce employee data management policies to comply with reporting and auditing processes.
• Deploy intelligent, automated workflows for approvals, tasks and acknowledgements.
• Manage employee/user access data in real time to make employees productive quickly.
• Unlock information with online storage and secure, anytime access.
• Share employee data seamlessly with all enterprise applications.

Accelerate Responsiveness with Structured Workflow
Verity's solution is built on the fundamental strategy and belief that it is necessary to provide robust functionality in this environment. Verity's automated, electronic workflows are easy to use, adjust and maintain. With BPM, Verity has taken all of the difficult tasks that usually require endless hours of programming by IT engineers and built them into comprehensive graphical design environments. Changes in a process are instantly accommodated and implemented by the HR business owner.

Accelerate Processes through Automation
Verity products transform the full breadth of human resource paper-based transactions into automated, electronic processes and optimize existing electronic processes. Verity products are "liquid" in that they flow around existing applications and automate them rather than forcing re-engineering. Critical documents and forms are not delayed or abandoned; instead they are automatically escalated to the appropriate person(s) in order to keep the process moving.

Connect Paper and Digital
Verity provides a solution that completely automates both paper and digital forms and documents, integrating them seamlessly with a company's HRMS and other line-of-business systems.

Connect People, Processes and Information
Verity solutions securely connect all people across the enterprise regardless of geography, whether inside or outside enterprise firewalls. Verity accomplishes all of this through open and industry-standard interfaces and formats such as PDF, HTML, InfoPath, XML and paper that are natural to everyday processes, providing maximum flexibility to users.

Enforce Best Practices and Policies
Verity completely removes the guesswork regarding complying with company policy and procedures for the hiring and termination process. All of the requisite form and document templates are stored in a secure central repository with permission so that only the required personnel have access. All forms and documents, whether filled out online or paper, are automatically and securely routed to the appropriate and authenticated individuals.

Enforce Auditability and Compliance
Verity provides complete real-time visibility into every step of the hiring and termination process. Each action is tracked and stored, including the snapshot of the document or form at each step of an approval or review cycle.

Return on Investment
The ROI associated with the Verity solution is measurable throughout the enterprise. The key benefits include …

• Hard-cost savings: more than 75% reduction in costs associated with shipping, paper, supplies and storage.
• Activity-based cost savings: decrease in labor spent administering the hiring and terminating process.
• Productivity gains: human resources personnel can spend more time on value-added activities that help increase the fiscal objectives of the company.
• Risk abatement: reduction in fees associated with lawsuits, compliance penalties and lost intellectual capital.

Verity and Intellectual Capital Management
Verity provides software that enables organizations to maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment. The company's intellectual capital management (ICM) solutions provide integrated search, classification, recommendation, monitoring and analytics across the real-time flow of enterprise information, along with self-service Q&A. In addition, Verity's business process management and content capture solutions activate information and accelerate its flow from person to person and between systems.

For more information about Verity products, contact us.

Source: Verity

The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County (Metro) serves the city of Nashville, whose city limits extend to the Davidson County line, making it the only city in Davidson County. Nashville is a growing metropolis consisting of about 570,000 people. A large government agency, comprised of 55 departments serving more than a half million Nashville residents, Metro manages significant volumes of documents.

The HR Challenge

One department within Metro whose business processes required a significant amount of manual labor and documents is Human Resources. The HR department would receive calls requesting beneficiary information, and would process the calls in the following manner:

1. The employee would record the caller's information for a return phone call.
   
2. The employee would go to the elevator to get to the ground floor.
   
3. They would then go across the street to the building housing the records.
   
4. Arriving at the building, they would request the record from the file clerk.
   
5. After receiving the file, they would copy the required pages.
   
6. The HR employee would return to their office.
   
7. They would then call the individual back to provide the requested information.

This seven-step process would take about an hour to complete, and it is one of many labor-intensive processes that fueled Metro's need for an enterprise document management system (EDMS) that would reduce total cost of ownership and allow for document accessibility across departments. "For Metro, it really came down to customer service for both the citizens of Nashville and the government employees," said John Stone, enterprise imaging project manager at Metro. "Our goal was to have an enterprise-class EDMS for any and all departments and agencies to use to improve their processes and productivity as well as collaborate on the records with each other."

The Solution

In 2002, Metro began working with AccuImage, LLC, a Nashville-based systems integrator and reseller of EDMS software, imaging hardware and information management services.

One document capture system would fit the needs of many different departments. These departments would be scanning and indexing a variety of documents at various times of the day, and they needed a system that could be centrally configured and administered. A decentralized scanning operation - where document capture occurs at the department where the paper originates - would facilitate the immediate accessibility of documents. "We did not want to shuffle paper from the departments to a centralized location to be imaged," added Stone. "We felt capturing the documents at the source expedited the imaging processes, especially since the expertise of the documents rested in the user departments."

Furthermore, a web-based EDMS would facilitate Metro's need for document viewing and searching within a web browser while maintaining a centralized document image repository. Since documents need to be scanned and indexed at locations throughout the county, an easy-to-use web-based distributed capture system was required. A web-based EDMS would allow Metro to quickly roll out document capture and image retrieval capabilities throughout the organization.

AccuImage implemented the Xtender suite of products from EMC Documentum. EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender serves as the electronic image repository for all documents scanned at Metro locations; WebXtender is the browser client that sits atop ApplicationXtender. These combined products allow Metro employees to retrieve, view and manage documents using standard web browsers.

AccuImage installed ApplicationXtender in four major departments: Human Resources, Water Services, Metro Schools, and the Clerk's Office. In addition, Captovation Web Capture, a browser-based, distributed scanning system, was implemented to facilitate the remote capture requirements. The departments are using the product with various scanners, including Canon DR-3060 and Fujitsu fi-4220 document scanners.

Within the Human Resources department, AccuImage first performed a back file conversion by imaging all of Metro's beneficiaries' records and personnel records. Patch code sheets were used to differentiate the different document types. The data entry operators simply entered the ID number for each employee. The number was then used to look up the rest of the employee's information from an external database.

HR now uses Captovation Web Capture, along with Captovation Recognition Server to scan and read the day-to-day business documents, some of which contain barcodes. Recognition Server reads the barcode and automatically populates the data within index fields. For documents without barcodes, Web Capture performs a database query within Metro's financial system. The user only has to key one primary index field, and then the query is performed on that field to retrieve additional index information.

Once a year, the Human Resources department has an open enrollment for employee benefits. These benefits forms are sent via U.S. Postal Service to all employees who are then given the option of faxing, mailing, or completing an electronic form on the Internet. HR employees use Web Capture to scan the returned paper documents that have barcodes. These documents do not require any manual indexing; the Recognition Server reads the two barcodes, employee identification and document type, and populates the required fields. The electronic forms are processed automatically as well via a "watched" e-mail box. As a document is completed online, it is submitted to the required location and Index Server processes them.

To process benefits forms returned via fax, AccuImage implemented Captovation Import Server, which allows Metro to import the native fax format and convert it into an industry-standard image file format - in this case, a TIFF. Import Server is configured to monitor a fax directory for the faxes received by Metro's HR department. This eliminates the need to scan faxed documents and helps prevent further degradation of image quality.

The Benefits

Thus far, the most significant benefit of Metro's new EDMS is that data, based on security permissions, can be shared amongst all Metro departments as required, facilitating immediate availability and accessibility. Records are available electronically 24 hours a day, seven days a week from any system. Records are also available to more than one user at a time. Out-of-file conditions no longer exist. Furthermore, employees no longer need to get up from their desks to retrieve files from file cabinets in different rooms, on different floors, or even in different buildings.

Metro has reduced the amount of data entry and manual processing required for their documents. No longer do employee benefits forms received by fax need to be scanned and manually indexed. Automated barcode recognition ensures that, once batch jobs are configured, little to no manual intervention is required.

Other ROI benefits include reduced physical document storage requirements. For example, Human Resources had been renting space in a separate building for the beneficiary records for several years. Due to the records being converted to electronic images, this space is no longer needed. The scanned records are boxed and stored at Metro's Record Center where the cost per square foot is substantially lower.

For more information about this successful solution, contact us.

After years of managing mounds of paperwork for employees, human resource managers are enjoying the world of web automation and a move toward a paperless, employee self-serve atmosphere.

"What I see is quite interesting. The Internet is a godsend to the human resources management process. It speeds things up and makes it easy," said Nancy Combs, president and CEO of HR Enterprise Inc., a Louisville-based human resources consulting firm.

Combs, who has seen many changes during her 35 years in human resources, is not alone in her assessment of what web-based technology is doing to automate human resources systems and procedures. Internal managers and external consultants alike see a proliferation of human resources activities transitioning onto the Internet.

According to Karen Bearden, president of The Bearden Group, a Louisville consulting group that focuses on training and development issues, the possibilities of handling human resources issues through the latest applications are endless.

Source: Business First of Louisville

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.