Distributed Data Capture - Technology to the Rescue

Distributed Data Capture Technology to the Rescue White Paper April 2008 Reducing the cost of remote business processes. In today’s global economy, information exchange is vital. Competitive advantage goes to the companies that can share information and collaborate quickly and accurately in the most cost-effective manner. Combine this with government requirements around data accuracy, security, and auditing, and your company’s very survival is at stake. Accurate, timely, and efficient data capture has quickly moved into virtually every corporation’s list of top business concerns. Important data can reside within documents that are created anywhere within an organization. Since 80% of all business data is unstructured, the challenge to integrate it is magnified. How do you effectively share this data, regardless of its form (paper or electronic), and satisfy everyone’s needs? The classic solution is to assign more people to manually handle data capture needs. You can hire resources to scan and convert customer orders, vendor invoices, and government tax documents, to name a few. However, this solution doesn’t scale well, increases your costs, and lessens your ability to compete globally. Besides being wasteful (most documents are reprinted or copied up to 19 times), manual data processing is slow and error-prone. Let’s examine some of the labor and material costs associated with data capture and processing within a typical organization: • Single document filing cost: $20 • Searching for a misfiled or wrongly categorized document: $120 • Reproducing a lost document: $220 • Invoice processing (critical to revenue generation): up to $80 These activities and their associated costs increase the cost of each sale and cut directly into your company’s margins. Lowering or eliminating these costs should be a priority, as the associated money can be retargeted to new revenue generating activities. In fact, manual document capture and data processing result in further unbounded costs to your company. Let’s take a look at this problem in more detail. White Paper – Distributed Data Capture Page 2 Manual Data Capture Problems Today, corporations increasingly outsource portions of their key business processes. Trends show that organizations are outsourcing more and are using more sources for these services worldwide. Relying on manual labor to capture data and integrate it within your distributed business processes is costly. For instance, important workflow decisions must be made at each remote location. This results in duplicated effort globally and can also lead to errors, inaccuracies, and lost data, all of which costs your corporation money. Inability to Scale On average, the volume of information produced by the typical corporation is growing by 50% annually. Today, a knowledge worker generates about 800 megabytes of data content each year and this figure will only grow larger. At the same time, government regulations require you to ensure that this information is secure, accurate, and auditable. This includes paper-based information, email messages, instant messages, and other electronic data that you transmit and receive each day. You need the ability to process, integrate, save, and retrieve all of this data instantaneously (structured, unstructured, paper, and electronic) regardless of where it resides. Relying on manual labor to perform this work globally represents a continually growing expense. Mail or Courier The relatively simple process of sending important documents by mail is slow and risky. Documents leave the relative security of your offices, and are out of your control for a length of time. They may even be lost. Overnight and express delivery offer more traceability and an increased level of service, but cost significantly more and pose the same security risks. Further, delaying business processes by even a day is unacceptable in many business transactions. Gathering all the required information from various locations at the moment you require it can be key to beating the competition. The costs, security risks, and time delays associated with mailing bulky documents (sometimes numbering hundreds of pages) costs money and future business as it negatively impacts your company’s ability to compete. Shipping data via CD or DVD, while eliminating some cost, poses the same risks and adds additional manual steps to the process. White Paper – Distributed Data Capture Page 3 FAX and Multi-function Peripherals Many corporations still rely upon fax machines or multi-function peripherals (MFP) for data transmission. While data transmission is much quicker than physically shipping documents, many problems remain. For instance, this requires a person to manually feed pages into a fax machine or watch over an MFP as it transmits the pages of a large document. Security is still a concern as you can never be sure who will intercept the data either on the receiving end (the wrong person picks up the document off the MFP) or along the way (via a data tap). Other problems include the inability to trace or audit the documents and related processes, telecommunication costs, the tedious manual labor that is required to complete the task, and, in the case of fax, the poor quality of the received documents. Because of this, the transmission of documents via fax is difficult to include as part of a secure, automated process. FTP and Other File-based Protocols File transfer protocol (FTP) and network-share based file-swapping protocols may be a tempting solution to your information sharing needs. Although transmission speeds are near instantaneous, security and other issues remain. For instance, FTP requires authentication outside the user’s current computer session. The need for a secondary password often results in the password being shared, copied onto paper, or eliminated altogether. Regardless of password strength, FTP data transmission is not encrypted and is easily intercepted. FTP and other file-sharing methods also suffer from a lack of delivery confirmation. There is no reliable, built-in method to ensure that the data was received, and that errors did not compromise the data along the way. Because of these two risks, it can be difficult to convince many vendors, customers, and government agencies to do business with you this way. Demand for Low-skilled, Manual Labor All of the issues in the tasks outlined above are worsened as they require large amounts of manual labor to complete. As your business demands grow, your need for more people and office space will grow also. Not only does this result in increased costs, it also impedes your corporation’s ability to grow. Additionally, the cost involved with continually hiring and training staff for these high-turnover positions results in lost productivity. Over time, your corporation is at risk to maintain these staff levels as your workload goes through cycles of lower volume. Then, when workloads increase suddenly, your ability to take on new work will be directly related to your ability to hire and train more people. As you spend time scaling up with more employees, space, and equipment, you may need to turn down projects that should be started immediately. White Paper – Distributed Data Capture Page 4 Further, errors from a labor-intense process that involves multitudes of staff distributed across remote locations can result in a loss of goodwill with your customers, which may result in decreased demand for future work. Lack of Security and Ability to Audit As mentioned earlier, the manual process of shipping, faxing, or sharing documents through other means has security risks that can impact your business. Important data can be compromised or lost altogether. For some business transactions, the results can be disastrous and can make or break your company’s future. Even when things go as planned, manual processes cannot be easily audited. Without this, you and your customers may be unable to meet certain regulatory requirements, significantly eliminating your ability to accept new work from many customers. To compete globally with a distributed workforce, you need a transparent process that can be audited from start to end. Accuracy Concerns As with any manual process, there’s potential for errors to be introduced at every stage. Documents can be faxed to the wrong number, pages can be omitted, documents can be routed to the wrong people, and information can be classified incorrectly. All of this results in unmitigated risk and represents the potential for lost repeat business and money. Further, lost productivity due to efforts to correct past mistakes inhibit your ability to service new projects and customers in a timely fashion. Your business requires a transactional process where mistakes are traceable, easily found, and easily corrected. The more you can ensure an accurate process and the sooner you can stop inaccuracies from making their way through the rest of your processes, the more successful your corporation will be. Lack of Integration Manual data capture and exchange results in even more work to integrate with existing enterprise systems, such as those for enterprise management and customer relationship management (CRM). In fact, many outside organizations require you to communicate with their back-end systems via XML or other application protocols. With manual data capture, you will need to hire specialized knowledge workers to perform the data transformations by hand. This costly, error-prone, and inefficient process can sink your business.