Information overload

With organisations often wasting considerable time and money through mismanagement of documents, Kofax’s Thomas Senger discusses how to best capture and manage your all-important information effectively.

BM. Why are capture and transformation technologies so important for organisations and how can they boost productivity and competitiveness?
Thomas Senger. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study, companies spend US$20 in labour to file a document, US$120 in labour to find a single misfiled document, and a staggering US$220 to reproduce a lost document. The same study records in detail, that 7.5 percent of all documents get lost, while three percent get misfiled and on average each document gets copied 19 times. These activities and their associated costs increase the cost of sales and cut directly into company’s margins. Lowering these costs has become a priority for businesses, retargeting related cost savings to new revenue generating activities. Advanced capture technology can solve this problem by eliminating tardy manual processes. Digital information can be easily shared with all subsystems and constituents of the respective business process.

However, capture and transformation is not only a question of pure cost reduction – and it´s not ‘only’ applicable to digitise information residing in paper. Solutions like Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange enable organisations to capture, enhance, intelligently extract and categorise relevant information from documents – regardless of their format – and then integrate the won information into a multitude of business processes. Furthermore, they enable automated notifications to the senders of the documents or any other involved instance. Resulting competitive advantages are not only related to reduced costs, but also to the ability to share vital information and collaborate quickly with suppliers and customers. Combined with the ability to meet governmental requirements around data accuracy, security, and auditing, information capture and transformation becomes a must-have for all organisations dealing with large numbers of documents.

BM. What are the common pitfalls that businesses encounter with their business process automation efforts and what should they do to overcome these obstacles?
TS. The most important thing about the successful implementation of a new solution is definitely the right preparation, which will result in tremendous dividends down the line. Industry experts agree upon the rule of ‘Ps’: ‘Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance’. I couldn’t agree more that the right preparation is key to a successful automation project. I would strongly recommend an in depth business process analysis; ideally together with an experienced vendor like Kofax or one of our business partners. Our professional services team is able to engage with clients throughout an entire project, from discovery and design through customising, implementation and support.

BM. What key trends will we see in the capture and transformation market in the next few years?
TS. One of the trends we clearly see is best described as ‘from back office to front office’. In the past, the promise of document image capture has been to simply introduce a scanner to a workflow, and to scan at the point of the largest volume of paper (back office). While demonstrating already a huge improvement, back office solutions don’t necessary deploy the full potential of modern capture and transformation technology. Modern, transactional capture systems, seamlessly connected to the business process they serve, are able to provide a much higher value.

Organisations are realising the benefits of capturing information at the earliest point (front office), while pushing for information being captured at multiple points.

In addition to centralised, high-volume operations, capture systems will be present throughout organisations including mobile devices which is another trend we observe. By integrating small workgroup scanners, multi-function peripherals (MFPs) as well as handheld devices, capture systems will turn into enterprise solutions. Kofax, the leading global provider of Intelligent Capture & Exchange solutions, is one of the trailblazers in the development of easy-to-install and easy-to-use distributed capture applications.

Thomas Senger is SVP of Applications Software Sales EMEA for Kofax Senior Vice President of Applications Software & Services EMEA. In this role he has full P&L responsibility for the entire region and manages a team of 150 sales and service employees. Senger reports to Alan Kerr, EVP of Field Operations.