Net profit

CXO. With the growing amount of documents received by businesses every day how important is it that companies have effective ways to manage and store them?

Daniel Izsak. Storing documents is something that companies have done for many years, but the problem has been that they haven’t had access to the data included in these documents. From a compliance point of view it is necessary to capture and store these documents but from a business perspective it is equally important from a business perspective to have access to the relevant data. Very often the data that's actually captured within documents is relevant to starting or supporting key business processes. The less time an organisation has to spend looking for the right information, be it a whole document or just data within it.

CXO. What are the implications for companies if they fail to implement effective capture solutions?

DI. On the document side, if they fail to put a solution in place, it represents a missed opportunity to improve productivity of the back office and in some cases it could become a compliance issue, especially when operating internationally. Looking at it from a business process and mission critical data point of view, the faster you can get to the relevant data, the more efficient the organisation is. If a company fails to jump on that train there is a danger that it will be unable to keep up with competitors, particularly in terms of back office productivity and, as an end-result, customer satisfaction.

Let me give you an example from a customer point of view. Two months ago, I returned an invoice for my mobile phone with a short letter explaining that the invoiced international rates do not match with the rates contractually agreed to. Three weeks later I received a reminder to pay the open invoice. I called the customer service, but the agent did not know about my letter, had no access to my contracts and could therefore not help at all. After receiving a second reminder and another round of frustration waiting for a service agent to pick up the phone, I was finally informed that my letter was on some employee’s desk and that the company would take care of it as quickly as possible. Just imagine how great it would have been for me as a customer if my letter had been registered at time of receipt and a corresponding note would have been placed in my file to be accessed by the service agent when I called in the first time.

CXO. What should businesses looking to apply document capture seek in a supplier? What are the most critical features of an effective capture system?

DI. My main recommendation is to focus the search on vendors who have an extensive track record for automated data extraction and less on the ones capturing documents with simple indexing. In terms of technology features, I think most importantly the vendor should be able to handle structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents on the same platform so you’ll have an integrated business process solution. A company considering implementing a data capture solution usually has one or more specific needs and might be focused on the status quo. It is of critical importance that, during the evaluation process, this company also considers what the future will bring. What will the next business process be and what kind of documents or data will I need to support it? Keeping an eye out for long-term goals will avoid these infamous “islands of technology”.

CXO. Have there been any significant developments you've made recently, and do you have major plans for the coming months and years?

DI. There have been many exciting innovations and there is more to come. This year’s new 5.0 release of OCR for AnyDoc, one of our core products, is great. 5.0 has a totally reworked user interface, adds much more functionality and therefore even more value to the customer at the same price level. The second addition, which is especially important for large companies is called AnyDocCLASSIFY. This new solution represents the answer to the digital mailroom question, whether the mail is received electronically or on paper. The speciality of AnyDocCLASSIFY is that customers do not work with a “black box” but are free to design and develop their own classification workflow and to actively influence and define the classification criteria that work best for each document type and customer environment. I would say out of the many things we do, these are probably the most groundbreaking new solutions that we have.

About the contributor

Daniel Izsak is General Manager Europe & Africa for AnyDoc Software. He is responsible for business strategy and activities in both regions and manages the European subsidiaries and the further expansion of Europe’s reseller network. Izsak has long-standing executive experience in the document management and IT Industry and holds M.S. degrees in Business Information Technology and Marketing.