Keep Information Moving with Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange

Keep Information Moving with Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange White Paper November 2006 “Business is a Conversation” – David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual By Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger Table of Contents The Problem ................................................................................................................................................................ 1 Document Capture Issues....................................................................................................................................... 2 Information Classification Issues........................................................................................................................... 3 Information Exchange Issues ................................................................................................................................. 3 The Solution: Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite ....................................................................... 4 Intelligent Capture: Scan-enable Any Business Application.......................................................................... 5 Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union .............................................................................................................. 5 Intelligent Capture in Action: Integration with Salesforce.com ..................................................................... 7 Intelligent Document Input: Move Documents Directly In-line with Business Processes and Applications .............................................................................................. 8 Case Study: DTI Integrated Business Solutions ................................................................................ 8 Intelligent Document Transformation and Classification: Reduce Points of Failure ......................... 9 Intelligent Document Exchange: Enhance the Business Relationship ............................................. 9 Intelligent Exchange for Customer Care ........................................................................................ 10 Intelligent Exchange for Order Processing ...................................................................................... 11 SOA-Compliant Development Toolkit ..............................................................................................11 Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) ............................................................................................. 12 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 12 i Imagine your business without boundaries; paper and electronic forms merge; you can capture information in any form, from any place; you can exchange information more efficiently to drive business processes, ensure traceability of information, and eliminate points of failure as information is managed throughout its life cycle. The Kofax® Intelligent Capture and Exchange product suite keeps information, and your business, moving. The Problem Information drives business and 80% of all corporate content is unstructured in nature. The volume of information produced is growing at 50% annually.1 On average, a knowledge worker generates about 800MB of content each year.2 At the same time, corporate governance standards require rigorous business practices that ensure the traceability and security of not only paper-based information, but also the countless emails, instant messages, and other electronic information that a business sends and receives. Often we tend to measure business-value on the basis of transactions; the number of customers, partners, employees, financial assets, and so on. However, a business is more than the sum of its transactions; it’s a conversation. Business is reflected in unstructured documents—such as memos, correspondence, email, contracts, forms, images, paper and electronic records—as well as structured documents such as orders and invoices. All of these documents are the tools of business, and they encompass the many different types of conversations that occur each day. Capture Historically,ethe processing of these interactions was predominantly a centralized, high volume, Exchang B ack-office tO Fron ffice batch function; but this is rapidly changing. The sale of distributed capture devices provides an indicator of this changing landscape. In the last three years, unit sales of high-volume scanners have been flat, whereas unit sales of workgroup scanners grew by 80% each year and are expected to grow an additional 40% through 2009.3 Accordingly, demand for ad-hoc capture solutions used by knowledge workers is rapidly increasing. apture Exchange There is also a shift toward transactional capture solutions that enable organizations to ck-office tO Fron ffice directly and reliably integrate capture and exchange solutions into their IT infrastructure, such as supply chain management; content management; and enterprise resource planning applications. Overall, the shift is toward business process automation that minimizes the potential for failure that can (and often does) occur between the time a document is created and the time it is consumed by an application. These leading market indicators demonstrate a need for intelligent process automation where information capture and exchange becomes part of an integrated life cycle management process. 1 Gartner, 2006 2 University of California at Berkley, 2003 3 IDC, 2005 1 This can be summarized as: Exc re h • A process that captures, enhances, and then intelligently extracts and tu ice Fron an off tO p k- ge Ca ffic categorizes relevant information from documents. c Ba e • A system that automatically notifies the sender when information is received. • A workflow that integrates a document into a business process, such as order processing, customer relationship management, or content management. • A secure system that notifies the sender when data has been extracted, so that corrections can be made in the event of an error or missing field within the document. • A process that notifies the recipient to fulfill an order request and/or undertake specific activities to handle the request. To meet these requirements, information capture and exchange needs to be tightly coupled with mainstream IT processes. Not surprisingly, Information Life-cycle Management (ILM) has emerged as a discipline to bring together the key elements of content-enabling technologies (such as information capture) and integrate them into business processes. ILM is defined as a “set of policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived, through its final disposition.” 4 The primary value of an integrated approach to intelligent capture and exchange is to reduce the potential points of failure within the discrete processes that support interactions between customers, partners and suppliers. For example, a 25% reduction in error handling cost will represent a 2% improvement in business margin.