by Tom Beasley

AccuImage turns ten this year!

In 1996, AccuImage was founded as a systems integrator of document and content management solutions. Over the past decade, we have grown to be a provider of comprehensive information management and business productivity improvement solutions.

As we celebrate our tenth anniversary in 2006, we are proud to offer a wide array of consulting, design, implementation and support services to meet the needs of any business. Our team is 100 percent committed to helping businesses like yours improve processes. We do this by leveraging the expertise of our business process consulting team and implementing proven technology that is designed to help you effectively manage your paper and your paper processes.

We look forward to celebrating this milestone year with you.

The first way we're celebrating together is through a special offer. As a valued subscriber to The AccuView, you are entitled to two complimentary hours of business process consulting services.* Simply call 615.242.7226 or e-mail sales@accuimagellc.com to schedule up to two hours of free, no-obligation consultation services for your business.

Do you know of anyone else who may be interested in this special offer? You are welcome to forward this e-mail to other interested individuals. All they need to do is subscribe to The AccuView. This special offer is open to current and new subscribers.

Watch for exciting AccuImage news and events throughout the year!

Best regards,

Tom Beasley
tom.beasley@accuimagellc.com

If paper is flooding your office - paper that is vital to your business - you may be considering some options to address it. One option that merits review is document management outsourcing, where a third-party service company manages all or part of your paper flow. The solution involves an outsourcing company providing some or all of the following services: receiving your documents, scanning them, indexing them, uploading them into a browser-based access program, and redundantly storing the files. The flexibility of this solution makes a strong case for why the document outsourcing market has grown over the past five years.

Is Document Management Outsourcing Right for You?
The benefits of an outsourcing solution are not limited to companies in particular verticals or of a certain size. The move to document management outsourcing is driven more by need, such as out-of-control or fluctuating volume, or complex invoices, to name a few. With that said, though, companies that exhibit such needs are typically in the financial, insurance, health care, retail and manufacturing verticals.

Fluctuating Volume is a Key Reason to Choose Document Outsourcing
The volume of documents that drives companies to seek a document management solution varies greatly, as Trevor Brown, chief marketing officer at LASON expresses: "In corporate accounts payable, a critical point may be processing 5,000 paper-based invoices a month. A claims processing or health care payer application could have 5,000 documents a day before the volume becomes too large to handle. The pain is not purely a function of volume, though. A widely fluctuating document flow plays a big role in a company's challenges with an in-house operation."

Fluctuating volume - surges of documents coming into the office at certain times, with mere trickles at other times - often translates to outsourcing being an effective document management solution. Organizations that most typically exhibit seasonal or other fluctuations in volume are tax forms processors, mortgage and loan companies, and mail order catalogue companies, to name a few. The rise and fall of interest rates driving the rise and fall of paper coming through mortgage offices is one example of this volume fluctuation.

Weigh the Investment of In-House Scanning
You may be thinking, "Why not bring an imaging and management system in-house?" That is not uncommon for companies inundated with paper. But the investment in an internal system requires a significant capital expenditure, and if the volume of documents you'll be processing isn't constant, it may be a waste of funds. For example, Company A and Company B may both process two million documents a year. However, Company A may process 1.5 million of those documents in a two-month period, versus Company B, where the document flow is spread throughout the year. An in-house scanning solution may very well work for Company B, and outsourcing is probably a better fit for Company A.

You'll also need to consider the labor involved in the imaging and indexing of the documents, and maintaining the equipment. For processing the documents in-house, you'll need to have adequate staff to organize the documents, scan them, re-sort them, shred or re-file them, and finally, index the images.

Volume is a Major Determiner of Document Outsourcing Costs
How much will it cost you to send your document management off-site? Pricing generally varies according to the array of services you choose. Obviously, you'll pay more for an end-to-end solution than for one or two steps in the process. But, some generalizations can be made: 1) Expect to pay some sort of startup fee to get the solution off the ground. 2) The complexity of your documents, in terms of manual labor to prepare them to be scanned, will affect pricing. 3) After those considerations, volume is a key factor. The number of documents scanned and images uploaded and stored usually determine a monthly or quarterly fee. And as a customer's volume increases or decreases, the fee will adjust accordingly.

Retain Security and Control in Your Outsourced Relationship
One other thing you'll need to consider is how comfortable you are with an outside company handling your documents. You'll want to find out what procedures a service company has in place to address security, like tracking documents with barcodes, storing documents in secure control rooms, and shredding documents when the scanning is complete.

Also, look at a service company's customers. Does it have experience with companies like yours? A service company with a footprint in the financial services or health care verticals will probably put your mind at ease more than one whose customers have less sensitive documents.

Source: Integrated Solutions, Khristen Chapin, December 2004

The Challenge

A subsidiary of Concentra, Inc., FOCUS Healthcare Management, Inc. operates one of the nation's largest workers' compensation PPO networks, with over 465,000 providers and facilities across all 50 states and in Washington, D.C. It is the primary responsibility of the FOCUS credentialing group to ensure that all providers are up-to-date on their licensure requirements, that they are legitimate in the network, that their licenses are renewed on time, etc. A typical provider file consists of approximately 40 sheets of paper.

All original paper documents have historically been stored in file folders - approximately three million pages of information, and growing - and kept in both onsite and offsite storage facilities. According to Walter Odom, a business analyst in FOCUS's IT department, the credentialing group faced two primary challenges as a result of the sheer volume of paperwork it generated and maintained.

1. As the provider network has grown over time, which in turn has resulted in an extraordinarily high volume of documentation, FOCUS was paying ever-increasing amounts of money in paperwork storage fees. The paper volume doubles every couple of years, which has perpetuated into a sizeable space concern.

2. It was becoming more difficult, and operationally more expensive, to search through storage facilities to provide paperwork in a manner that promoted high-quality customer service. The time it was taking to find and pull files, the people needed to retrieve them, and the amount of files that get misplaced translated into an increase in costs and a decrease in productivity, especially considering the ever-rising volume of files.

When in need of specific documentation, FOCUS employees would have to physically dig through thousands of boxes and/or filing cabinets - most of which were stored in a large offsite warehouse - to find it. This was a labor-intensive process that was hindering their ability to provide information to requestors in a timely manner.

The Solution

As part of this solution, AccuImage seamlessly integrated the following products:

• One Kodak i810 High-Speed Scanner
• One Kodak i260 Production Scanner
• EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender
• EMC Documentum WebXtender
• AnyDoc Software's OCR for AnyDoc
• EMC Legato DiskXtender

The new system acts like a virtual file room, with intuitive search and retrieval functions, and it is already beginning to replace FOCUS's physical storage space. Odom estimates that, in addition to offsite storage space, at least 150 square feet will be freed up in their building. All documents are scanned at one of two locations. OCR for AnyDoc extracts user-specified information from a variety of forms and documents; the extracted data is uploaded into ApplicationXtender and is associated with the image from which it was extracted. The captured information serves as index data and is available for querying through WebXtender.

Several types of documents are being scanned into the system, including contracts, records of adverse action, letters and other correspondence, conversation logs, and meeting notes, to name a few. FOCUS employees can search by provider name (the most commonly-used index field), practice name, document control number, date, state, etc. They perform a query, and WebXtender locates and displays the applicable data and document image.

AccuImage has been helping FOCUS populate the system by performing document scanning in their service bureau. FOCUS outsources boxes of documents to the AccuImage document conversion service bureau on an as-needed basis. Documents are scanned and then AccuImage provides the images on CD to FOCUS for uploading into the document management system. This service is helping FOCUS work their way through approximately three million pages that make up their backlog of paper files.

Read Complete Case Study

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.