Intelligent Capture and Exchange – Because Competition Is Just One Click Away

DICOM Group plc is a global leader of Information Capture and Business Communications solutions. Its leading edge capture and communication technologies and solutions enable Business Process Automation by managing the transformation and exchange of business-critical information residing in various formats such as paper, fax, electronic documents, e-mail, SMS among people, applications and devices. The company’s centres for product development and marketing include Kofax, the world’s leading provider of Information Capture solutions, and Topcall, a worldwide provider of Business Communication technology.

With the new “Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite” DICOM presents a breakthrough solution to reduce cost, minimize risk and increase efficiency as well as customer satisfaction.

In today’s world, organisations are faced with ever growing challenges. Globalisation and increasing competitive pressures not only demand cost reductions and the compliance to severe legal directives, but also above all oblige organisations to clearly differentiate their products and commit to a full customer focus.

As a consequence, there is a market shift towards proce automation with organizations adapting their business processes to maximize the automation bene¬fits. C-level executives are looking for ways to extend the lessons and benefits of e-business to other business processes. Business process automation (BPA) and re-engineering are „top of mind“. The potential return on investment and tangible increase in customer satisfaction are compelling.

Paper-based information remains an obvious candidate for process improvement

An infrastructure built to support real-time e-business processes is predictably ineffective when dealing with paper. While organisations want to extract, categorise and transform the vital information in those documents at their point of origin for immediate use in a business process, manual methods of extraction and validation tend to be costly and faulty.

For this reason, there is a need to unite both paper and electronic information sources, more easily integrate information where it enters an organisation, and provide knowledge workers with simple tools that work with existing corporate applications.

"There is an overwhelming need to automate the plethora of business transactions that are paper-based, or that include one or more paper-based sub-processes, to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Corporate governance requirements which require traceability and information security compound this problem and customers, suppliers and partners demand fast and accurate responses to queries, regardless of their original form," said Melissa Webster, program director at IDC.

Organisations want to transform paper-based information into an electronic, actionable equivalent as early in the business process as possible and rout them to people who can respond actively.

As a result, the capture of information is being moved from a centralized back-office process to an every¬day front-office activity to support a wide range of business transactions. It is being performed by knowledge workers as part of mainstream office automation. The rise of ad-hoc scanning, which includes desktop scanners and the rapid proliferation of MFPs (multi-function peripherals), expresses itself in a compound annual growth rate of 39% per year.

Business critical information is now being captured directly within a business process and shared with all who are part of the process,– no matter, whether the information is paper-based or in electronic format.

Business is a conversation

The concept of Intelligent Capture and Exchange - IC&E - responds to the fact that business is an ongoing conversation between stakeholders in a business transaction, not a linear process. It represents the next evolutionary step in a process that has seen capture evolve from a late stage business operation to one which initiates numerous business processes, enabling many organisations to significantly increase their efficiency.

IC&E allows organisations to link the ever-in¬creasing volume of paper-based and electronic information with mission-critical business activities such as sales order automation, invoice processing, loan origination, account openings, con¬tract life cycle management and forms processing applications.

Melissa Webster, program director at IDC: "Solutions such as Intelligent Capture and Exchange provide a direct connection between information capture and transactional business processes, fundamentally changing the way such information is managed - from a batch-driven, back-office process to one that is central to business operations."

The Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange solution suite addresses four critical business requirements:

• Captures and Transforms information during business transactions, such as sales order processing and customer relationship management, to meet increased customer expectations for fast, responsive e-business processes;
• Creates a Constant Dialog between stakeholders in a business process by way of exchanging vital information at the right rime between the right people.
• Removes points of failure by automating the integration of paper and electronic documents directly into business processes;
  
• Reduces risk by leveraging enterprise IT standards for integration with existing business applications and by meeting corporate regulatory requirements for traceability of documents.
  The integration of Intelligent Capture and Exchange into business processes enables organisations to
  
• automate the time-consuming cognitive tasks of accurately processing, extracting and classifying structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents;
• integrate the extracted information into business processes automatically;
• exchange information securely between the sender and recipient through automated notifications and confirmations, and to
  
• proactively notify departments, partners, vendors and customers, when critical information is received or when corrective action is necessary.

To address the need for inter-operable software that preserves and protects an organisation's IT investment, the Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange solution uses a service-oriented architecture to expose its capture, transformation and exchange functionality as readily accessible and usable Web services.

With the integrated document exchange component of the suite, organisations can now accelerate business processes, reduce manual handling of information and improve communications among business partners: All incoming faxes, contracts, forms and e-mails are captured, intelligently categorised, and made available directly within the CRM application. Appropriate staff are alerted for problem resolution, exception reports are forwarded to management, and confirmations, status reports and resolutions are automatically sent to customers.

"The Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange suite now automates the capture of information from documents and forms, and delivers reliable, retrievable information to business applications. Before the new system was introduced, manual validation took an average of three to four minutes of individual image processing time to complete. With the new system, that same task now takes between 15 to 20 seconds, a reduction of more than 90 percent. We are now able to double our production capacity without adding staff," summarises Manual Rocha, customer operations manager at Portugal Telecom Communications.

To find out how IC&E can bring your organization one click ahead of the competition, visit: www.intelligentcaptureandexchange.com/