Assessment of Kofax - VirtualReScan

Richard Medina and Bob Anders Assessment of Kofax VirtualReScan 2001 Doculabs, 1201 West Harrison Street, 3rd Floor, Chicago, IL 60607, 312-433-7793, info@doculabs.com. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Doculabs is a registered trademark. All other product names are trade and service marks of their respective companies. Table of Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................... 3 Maximizing Capture Throughput and Productivity.................................. 4 Optimizing Effective Throughput...................................................................5 Kofax VRS Approach to Effective Throughput ........................................ 6 Company Overview.........................................................................................6 VRS Product Overview ...................................................................................6 Capabilities......................................................................................................7 Strategic Benefits ....................................................................................... 8 Image Quality ..................................................................................................8 Input Range ...................................................................................................11 Usability.........................................................................................................11 Speed.............................................................................................................12 Conclusion................................................................................................ 13 Appendix: About Doculabs...................................................................... 14 2 DOCULABS WHITE PAPER ©2001 Doculabs EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Organizations that need to quickly and accurately capture and digitize their business-critical documents must concern themselves with much more than scanner speed. Factors such as image quality, document input range, and usability all contribute to the overall efficiency of a scanning system. For example, poor image quality, inability to handle diverse document types, and hard-to-use interfaces all contribute to more time spent in scanner setup, adjustment, and rescanning – which increases the overall time and cost of a scanning operation. One vendor offering organizations a compelling solution for reducing the operational costs and increasing the productivity of their document capture operations is Kofax Image Products. The company’s VirtualReScan (VRS) solution provides an easy-to-use interface and tools for users to adjust critical scanning parameters such as brightness, skew, and contrast for multiple types of complex documents in a single batch. Then, at run-time, VRS automatically applies these adjustments and corrections to ensure that the best images are moved from the scan station into the application. Kofax commissioned Doculabs, an independent research and consulting firm, to objectively test, analyze, and articulate the performance of Kofax’s VRS technology and its ability to increase an organization’s scanning productivity, reduce errors and rescanning, increase the usability of the scanning system for operators, and ultimately reduce overall scanning costs. Doculabs found that Kofax’s VRS provides a strong solution for making any document capture process more efficient, because it addresses image quality, document input range, and usability together in a single solution. Through the use of VRS, organizations can reduce their document preparation times, simplify their scanning process, and improve document image quality for OCR applications. The fact that VRS addresses all of these factors within a single product makes it a particularly strategic approach for maximizing the effective throughput of document capture operations. FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT OF KOFAX VIRTUALRESCAN 3 ©2001 Doculabs MAXIMIZING CAPTURE THROUGHPUT AND PRODUCTIVITY The goal of any capture system is to get document information into downstream systems as quickly and efficiently as possible, maximizing throughput. Thus, capture operation efficiency hinges on achieving acceptable output quality, in minimal time, with minimal cost, over a sustained duration. In addition, a capture system must work well with all the other components in the input process, including scanners, capture software, recognition engines, and downstream information systems such as imaging applications or line-of-business applications. We call this “effective throughput.” There are four key factors that contribute to the overall performance and efficiency – the effective throughput – of a document capture system, including: • Speed The speed of the scanner and the speed of the image processing stage of the scan process contributes to the overall throughput speed of a scanning process • Image Quality High-quality images not only are easier to read by humans, but they lead to higher accuracy by automated recognition technologies such as OCR engines (which minimizes manual data entry and re-scanning) • Input Range The ability for scanning systems to handle the documents you need to scan – which may include a wide variety of complex documents (multiple sizes, multiple colors, etc.) in single or multiple batches – in order to minimize document preparation, quality assurance, and re-scanning • Usability If the scanning system is easy for administrators and operators to use, it will reduce time spent in configuring the system for optimal performance, and will minimize the training needed to use the system Getting all of these factors to work together to maximize throughput is a difficult task, especially in high-volume scanning operations. For example, some scanning solutions provide good image quality, but configuring the scanner settings and parameters can be extremely complex and time-consuming. Similarly, easy-to-use systems may lack the input range or image quality needed in high-volume environments with diverse documents. Few technologies are designed to address all of the factors involved in maximizing effective throughput. 4 DOCULABS WHITE PAPER ©2001 Doculabs Optimizing Effective Throughput To optimize the capture process, one must analyze it in stages, determine the dependencies and weak links, and then choose components and processes to optimize the overall input process. The input process consists of three main stages, pre-recognition, recognition, and post-recognition. Pre-recognition consists of document design, processing, and delivery; document availability for input; document preparation; document feeding and handling; capture; image enhancement and correction; and possible rescan. The recognition phase consists primarily of recognition and indexing. The post-recognition phase includes error detection; error correction; re-keying; possible re-scanning and exception handling; and release to a downstream repository. If you analyze the costs of each stage, you can divide the input process into relatively high cost stages and relatively low cost stages, where cost is a function both of the direct cost of a stage and the cost of the stages that depend on it. High cost stages generally include document preparation, all rescan and exception handling, and all post-recognition stages (except release). Low cost stages generally include capture, recognition and indexing, and release. A quick look at the factors involved in effective throughput will show that there are more important factors than scanner speed. Speed is linear and predictable, as pages-per-minute is an easily calculable rate. However, other factors can have a much more dramatic impact on overall capture time. For example, higher OCR accuracy can reduce or eliminate re-scanning and manual data entry, which are extremely time-consuming. Similarly, a system that is easy to set up and configure for a range of document types will greatly reduce setup time and document preparation time. Clearly, maximizing efficiency in each of these areas – especially the high-cost areas – can pay big dividends in terms of overall effective throughput. Kofax developed its VirtualReScan (VRS) solution with these factors in mind. By automatically improving image quality and ensuring that only high-quality images are sent into the application, the system minimizes errors and manual data entry, makes it easier for scanner operators to improve image quality on the fly, and reduces costly and time-consuming rescans and exception handling. Thus, unlike other document input or capture technologies, Kofax VRS is designed to address all of the factors involved in maximizing effective throughput within a single solution.