Capture Makes the Grade

Today, Apr 2004 by Bolita, Dan

Technology's Test is in its Solution

Much of the past decade has been about technology development, with insufficient time spent harnessing that technology to solve specific business problems. That's beginning to change.

Looking back on the ancient history of document capture (say ten years ago), the technology was so remarkable that the ability to convert paper to its digital likeness on a monitor was seen as reward enough. With document imaging came a radical shift in a number of paper processes. Keying from image became widespread as high volume data entry operations were some of the earliest adopters of document imaging tools.

Developments in character recognition, as well as the pervasive use of e-mail have brought greater numbers and types of documents into the digital age. However, as with any new or developing work process, there were a number of unforeseen complications that came with digital imaging. Issues of accuracy were the first to be addressed, however file storage (back when a megabyte of storage actually cost something) also became an issue. Likewise early adopters struggled with managing access to those formerly-paper pages, or more importantly, access to the information those pages contained.

While some of these issues have been addressed, the sheer volume of information now being captured has magnified these same problems-storage, access, data-mining-as additional complications have arisen. Most recently issues of security, system compatibility and regulatory compliance have challenged capture system administrators. These managers face barriers unforeseen in those early days of a decade ago.

Questions such as: how will exceptions be handled? (The most costly part of any capture system.) What are the trade-offs that affect scanner performance? Is it possible to capture mail at its point of entry (a mailroom) and distribute it electronically? Should the entire capture process (or at least a portion of it) be sub-contracted to a service bureau? (And if so, how will the data, content, or even receivables be transferred?) How will information about receivables affect a business' cash flow? How can small financial service providers offer access to archived images? Can a complete information capture system minimize the need for manual data entry, maximize automation and just as importantly, maximize the long-term ROI of the technology investment?

Fortunately, each of these questions is addressed in the pages of this supplement.

With the volume of paper documents most companies process, manual data entry can be a crippling bottleneck that leads to inefficiencies and inaccuracies-things few businesses can afford. Forms processing software, and the next generation of unstructured document processing software solve the paper problem by increasing efficiency, reducing data entry costs and increasing data accuracy.

When choosing an automated data capture solution, AnyDoc Software stresses the point that the technology should grow as your organization grows. A good solution must possess all the capability for the data capture you need today and the data capture you'll need tomorrow.

AnyDoc Software's OCR for AnyDoc exemplifies this next generation of software in its ability to work with every kind of document in every industry. OCR for AnyDoc extracts information from existing invoices, forms and documents. The software achieves up to 99.9% accuracy in extracting information from documents containing machine print, hand print, mark sense and one- and two-dimensional bar codes.

Once the data is extracted and validated, questionable characters or fields can be displayed to be corrected or accepted. The final step is to create an ASCII file of the validated, corrected and verified data from the forms tor further processing.

Kofax's just-announced decision to join the fiercely competitive forms processing space, is a reflection of the market becoming more solution-focused. Kofax is well known for its Ascent capture platform and as developer of the image processing tool VRS (VirtualReScan). According to Kofax Product Marketing VP Anthony Macciola, the initial forms processing product Xtrata will be marketed as a modular extension of the company's existing Ascent Capture suite. However, once established among Kofax's 11,000-customer installed base, Macciola hints that a standalone product might be forthcoming.

Recognizing that a foray into a already crowded field of forms processing vendors, will require product feature differentiation or pricing concessions, Kofax seems prepared to offer both. Macciola quotes a price of "about half that of the competitors," including the cost of the requisite Ascent. The most notable feature is the software's ability to correct for variances in aligning form template registrations. This addresses the nagging problem of having to re-define templates for established forms due to slight changes in printing or scanning. Kofax is quick to stress its continued reliance on existing forms processing development partners, which offers solutions for extremely high-volume processing applications.