by Tom Beasley

Happy New Year!

This year marks our 11th year doing business as AccuImage, LLC, and 33 years since the foundation for AccuImage was laid in American Micrographics. The transition from American Micrographics to AccuImage in 1996 was rooted in the premise that PC-accessible images were the wave of the future for document retention and accessibility.

… and they still are. In fact, today, businesses increasingly require access to document images and the content contained on them faster than ever before. The need for image accessibility -immediately and throughout core business processes - is driving document scanning operations out of the back office and into the front office. Along with this migration to decentralized scanning comes technologies that image-enable line-of-business applications.

In this issue of The AccuView, we introduce two such technologies. The Document Scan Server from Kofax is an integrated hardware/software solution that offers tools to scan-enable core business applications and gives users the ability to drive a document scanner from a scan-enabled application. Furthermore, the Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite allows organizations to link the ever-increasing volume of paper-based and electronic information with mission-critical business activities such as invoice processing, loan origination, account openings, contract lifecycle management, and forms processing applications.

We can help you maximize the automation benefits brought about by document capture. We can help you move document capture out of your back office and into your front office. We can help you image-enable your line-of-business applications. Please call 615.242.7226 to discuss your unique business processes and needs. We look forward to working with you!

Wishing you all the best in 2007!

Tom Beasley
tom.beasley@accuimagellc.com

Paper documents can enter your organization through headquarters, a branch office, or even the warehouse. Even more important than the paper are the business processes driven by the information it contains. The sooner you capture that information, the better your business performs. So, how do you capture all of that valuable information in a timely manner? You collect it where it originates and get it into the business systems used to run your organization.

There are becoming increasingly fewer operations best served as central processing sites. More and more traditional business processes can now be handled at the point of origin. In many organizations, the capture of information can be moved from a centralized back-office process to an everyday front-office activity.

"Near-desktop scanning helps to dismantle central scanning sites, and lowers errors by sourcing content closer to the user," observes Craig LeClair, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "This is an important trend in the industry as this will help move traditional back-office functions to front-office knowledge workers."

Two decades ago, automating a document process meant scanning large volumes of paper for image-presentment on a monitor for data entry operators. Thanks to high-speed computer processing, advances in character recognition, and the pervasiveness of networking systems - most notably the Internet - information capture and the processes themselves are much more intertwined.

While high-volume scanning has remained static, or is beginning to decline, the demand for ad-hoc scanning solutions remains strong. This shift from high-volume to transactional capture comes in response to the need to truncate paper as early as possible in its lifecycle. Ad-hoc scanning, which includes desktop scanners and the rapid proliferation of MFPs (multi-function peripherals), has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of 39 percent year-over-year.

The new Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite allows organizations to link the ever-increasing volume of paper-based and electronic information with mission-critical business activities such as invoice processing, loan origination, account openings, contract lifecycle management, and forms processing applications. It was initiated in response to the challenges being faced by customers related to their business processes. These include the need to unite both paper and electronic information sources, more easily integrate information where it enters an organization, and provide knowledge workers with simple tools that work with existing corporate applications.

Address Critical Business Requirements

Kofax's Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite addresses four critical business requirements.

• Adapt to the way knowledge workers perform their job, rather than the other way around, by scan-enabling any business application.
• Remove "points of failure" by automating integration of paper and electronic documents directly into business processes.
• Reduce risk by leveraging enterprise IT standards for integration with existing business applications and by meeting corporate regulatory requirements for traceability of documents.
• Capture and exchange information during business transactions, such as sales order processing and customer relationship management, to meet increased customer expectations for responsive e-business processes.

The Value of Intelligent Exchange

Transactional business interactions such as acknowledgements, confirmations, alerts and clarifications are by their nature bidirectional exchanges between an organization and its suppliers, partners, customers and employees. Maintaining and improving the quality of the ongoing conversation between business partners is much more valuable than simply automating document capture.

Often documents require a predictable action, such as incoming invoices requiring payment, or large transactions needing to be routed to a financial officer. By effectively moving the capture process inside an organization's business process, the input, validation and response to incoming information becomes seamless and collaborative.

A real-time, collaborative approach to capture - within a familiar user interface - removes many of the steps ("points of failure") that consume the most in time and labor to correct, particularly the longer it takes to discover them. The cost savings can be tremendous. Research has estimated that the simple process of returning to sender costs an organization $4.50 per error. When multiplied over multiple errors in a high-volume environment, the costs are substantial.

Intelligent exchange delivers incremental value, when you …

• Use exchange as the very vehicle that transmits documents from sender to recipient, either via fax or as e-mail attachments. This eliminates the cost and time associated with printing and mailing on the sender side, and document receipt, preparation and input on the recipient side.
• Use exchange as an automated sender notification mechanism, to alert a sender that a business application has received the sender's input, or to indicate to the sender what information has actually been captured. This enhances the value of the business relationship by keeping the sender informed about the status of the document as it is processed by the recipient.
• Use exchange as an automated means to alert an internal party about the arrival of certain information in the system, seeking an anticipated action from the receiving party, and thereby avoiding more costly human intervention down the line.
• Use exchange as a two-way messaging system to establish a direct dialog between two business parties, to handle exceptions, errors, discrepancies, and other action-dependent information.

Leveraging exchange to automate exceptions can have a major impact on the direct costs of a business process, since a significant portion of the ongoing costs in transactional capture solutions often goes to manual exception handling performed by costly knowledge workers.

"There is an overwhelming need to automate the plethora of business transactions that are paper-based, or that include one or more paper-based sub-processes, to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Corporate governance requirements which require traceability and information security compound this problem and customers, suppliers and partners demand fast and accurate responses to queries, regardless of their original form," said Melissa Webster, program director at IDC. "Solutions such as Kofax's Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite provide a direct connection between information capture and transactional business processes, fundamentally changing the way such information is managed - from a batch-driven, back-office process to one that is central to business operations."

Sources: Kofax and TODAY (January/February 2007)

New Product Facilitates Rapid Deployment

With the release of Kofax Document Scan Server, Kofax laid the foundation for the rapid deployment of its applications to a broadly distributed market. The small hardware device and its supporting software provide a solution that scan-enables any existing business application such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply-chain management) or ECM (enterprise content management) systems.

The Document Scan Server allows applications to become instantly capture-enabled without installing any device drivers, or necessitating IT administrative changes. Previously, a solution of this kind required specialized software and drivers to be installed on each computer. The Document Scan Server can eliminate the need for IT staff to set up administrative rights, train workers on new software or install updates.

Create Scan-Enabled Applications. The Document Scan Server Web Services SDK gives developers and integrators the ability to essentially add a "scan" button and scanning functionality to a software application. The tight integration of scanning and a core business application allows for efficient business processes and improved access to information. (AccuImage can do this for you!)

Connectivity Doesn't Compromise Security. The solution includes an embedded hardware appliance with a USB port for scanner connectivity and an Ethernet port that connects your scanning infrastructure to the network. This hardware-based approach makes the scanner a network attached device and is a secure alternative to the way scanners are typically deployed.

Centralized Management Eases Deployment. Document Scan Server offers centralized management capabilities for network discovery, configuration and ongoing management. With the Management Console, administrators can configure multiple Document Scan Server devices and can push out firmware updates and new drivers to keep them up-to-date. The Management Console also can access user statistics and logs to proactively manage capture hardware.

True, Thin Client Scanning. No code whatsoever (not even applets or ActiveX controls) is installed on the client PC. This means that a document scanner now can be driven from a true, browser-based application. Plus, the scanner is accessible from Windows, Mac and Linux clients, thin client terminals, and in Citrix environments. Document Scan Server can play in virtually any IT environment with no change to the existing PC configuration.

Simplified Connectivity and User Setup. After the Document Scan Server is configured and sent to the location where it will be deployed, it only takes a few connections to get up and running. Back at the central site, administrators set up user accounts, user privileges, and configure settings - removing complexity for end users and allowing for consistent, error-free scans. (AccuImage can do this for you!)

Integration with Kofax Ascent Capture. Document Scan Server complements centralized document capture technology like Kofax's Ascent Capture. Even when deployed in a distributed environment, Document Scan Server can connect to Ascent Capture through the Ascent Collection Server. This seamless connectivity enables you to use additional Kofax solutions to build a decentralized capture system designed to address your business requirements.

Need Additional Information?

For more information about Document Scan Server or any Kofax product, please contact AccuImage, LLC at 615.242.7226.

Source: Kofax

As the name implies, the central objective of content management is control, but that mission is often compromised by complexity: multiple content management systems deployed throughout the enterprise, cumbersome indexing and retrieval requirements, and confusing, inconsistent user interfaces.

"Content management implementations that force users to change their behavior stand a much higher chance of failure, due to lack of end user adoption," says Kyle McNabb, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "Content management has to be virtually transparent for the end user, and this means integrating it within tools such as Microsoft Office, ERP or a line-of-business application."

The most basic and widespread need for content management is simply to provide access to documents and other forms or "unstructured" information. The more transparent a content management system can be to end users, the more it will be used and the more value it will deliver.

"Only when an enterprise focuses on a specific process or constituencies can they succeed," says Forrester's McNabb. "The context of how content needs to be put to use is incredibly important to any enterprise content management initiative."

The Brief

Content management works best when it's least intrusive. As pressure mounts to gain control over content enterprise-wide, success will depend on integrating access to content with heavily used apps and automating content classification.

Options

• Expose content through Microsoft Outlook. Most enterprise content management (ECM) systems offer Outlook plug-ins that let you expose content repositories and folders.
  
• Integrate with ERP and line-of-business applications. Screen-scraping techniques and API-integrations expose content directly through business and desktop apps.
  
• Automate classification steps. Metadata and retention schedules can be applied automatically when users save or drag and drop content into specific folders, or when workflows trigger certain actions or events.
  
• Assess enterprise-wide management and retention needs. Will compliance and discovery mandates demand control over all content? Several applications offer low-cost, every-seat options for basic content control.
  
• Exploit content services. This emerging option promises to bring content into the context of applications without the rigidity and fragility of conventional integration techniques.

Action Items

• Develop an enterprise-wide taxonomy and strategy. Most companies manage content departmentally, but it's best to address content and record classification, management and retention companywide.
  
• Determine where and how most users work. Some users just need access, while others need to update and act upon content. If most users work in Outlook or ERP, the best integration choice may be obvious, but multiple options may be required as the user community grows.

Source: Intelligent Enterprise (June 2006)

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.