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Document Automation BLOG

Invoice Scanning Benefits
05Dec

AP Automation Aftermath:  The Benefits

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

Post AP Automation Project Benefits (The Pain Is Worth It)

Ah, the pain of going paperless.   The grumpy AP Clerk that stomps her foot and says “I want my paper”.  The sweat rolling down the AP Manager’s temple as they hit the green light on the scanning project to go to production.  The smiles at the end of the first week, and the “That wasn’t so hard after all.”

There are always bumps in the pavement on the road to any digital AP Process.  It takes a while to get the kinks out of the process, and create a “humming” invoice scanning process.  It’s funny, but we mostly focus on the process improvement, speed and efficiencies gained on what we call the “front end”, or the ingestion and extraction of information from paper invoices.   But there is a whole separate set of benefits that comes from creating a digital repository for later access.  Below are some key benefits, post process:

  1. Rapid Search and Retrieval – Now that invoices are in digital form, and are full-text searchable, you now have the power of instant access at your fingertips. Need to see all invoices processed on the last two days of the month…BOOM.  Want to see all invoices where widget XYZ was ordered in March…BA-BING.
  2. Audit Heaven – Need to provide auditors with a specific set of selected records? Just search for the documents you need, and export to a drive or network location.  No more printing or copying required (insert cost and time savings here).
  3. The Purge – No more file cabinet and record purge parties. With advanced invoice repositories, you can now, with the click of a button, archive off older records according to your records retention policies.
  4. Security for Records – now your accounting records are secure, and can be restricted to only those that need access. Folders will no longer wander away, and disappear forever (or sit on someone’s desk for a week).
  5. Shared Access – With security in place, and an online repository created, other departments can be given access to records, which is a huge help for over tasked accounting clerks. This is an even bigger benefit in companies with a centralized HQ and branch offices that require record access.

This is a just a short list of “Aftermath” benefits from the initial pain of an AP Automation.  Did I miss any?  Take a look at my first post here for the front-end “Benefits of AP Automation”.

Digital, Mobile Forms
01Dec

5 Benefits of Digital Forms

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

How can digital forms improve your business?

It is amazing how many businesses still conduct many customer facing operations using paper.  With all the talk of the benefits of the paperless office, eliminating paper is still a slow process for most organizations.  While scanning can help reduce paper workloads, the next logical step is usually the elimination of paper-based forms with digital forms, or eforms.  Below are some of the key benefits of any paperless form initiative:

  • Paper and Form Cost Savings – the most basic benefit is the savings on form production and printing.  Depending on how you create your forms, this can be a tremendous cost savings both in production, and in the back end processing.
  • Rapid Deployment – with electronic forms, you can create your form quickly, and deploy it just as fast.  No more waiting for print services or a form order.
  • Instant Access to Data – with digital forms, your data is instantly accessible, in real time.  You can quickly and easily make informed business decisions with all the information you require.
  • Reduced Operational Costs – without the need for back-end form data entry and/or scanning and processing, you can now reduce personnel requirements, and drive down costs.
  • Enable Your Mobile Workforce – with the advent of mobile technology, everyone can now be a “data collector”.  Gathring information from all your employees can now be accomplished in the blink of an eye.

Did I miss any?  Please comment.

eDiscovery and Document Capture
24Nov

Legal and Document Capture: 5 Key Features

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

5 Features Every Law Firm Can Leverage

 

In this day and age, law firms and legal departments are looking to technology for the edge in any legal matter.  Whether it is the eDiscovery process, or just the task of scanning and performing OCR on a large volume of documents from opposing counsel, document capture applications can provide powerful, time-saving tools.  Below are some key features:

  • Automated Classification – with classification, documents can be automatically tagged and routed based on content or key identifying text.  You can look for individual words, combinations, or even complex patterns.  This provides a massive time savings, as well as an automated method of getting only the required documents to review.
  • Key Data Extraction – Looking for that needle in a haystack?  With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and pattern matching, you can now pull critical case information from a document automatically, and output to a variety of formats.
  • Fast OCR=Quick Searching – a semi-full of documents in boxes?  No problem, with our production OCR engine, you can convert large volumes at 10-15x that of standard desktop OCR applications.
  • Auto-Filing – with intelligent processing and routing, you can send only those documents that meet your rules or criteria to specific locations, allowing for rapid review.
  • Digital or Paper Documents – with advanced capture, you can process legal documents from CD, a hard drive, and any other digital source.  You can quickly switch back and forth between digital and a scanner for paper processing.

This is just a short list, and there are way too many features to include (redaction, bates stamping, etc.).

Scanned File Sizes for SharePoint
20Nov

Planning for Scanning: File Sizes

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

Don’t Ignore Your File Storage Needs

 

Probably one of the most ignored planning attributes in any scanning project is projecting required storage for your scanned files.  Scanning to TIFF/PDF or any other image format can create huge files if not managed.  Below is a quick average file size for specific scanning settings:

  • 200 DPI Black and White – 26KB
  • 300 DPI Black and White – 38K
  • 300 DPI Grayscale – 301KB
  • 300 DPI Color – 577K

Depending on your needs and requirements, 300 DPI seems to be the norm for most scanning projects.  This resolution provides the smallest file size with the best image quality for enhanced document capture features like OCR.  You can see that grayscale and color create huge files, and are really not required for most document archiving operations, unless there are color markups or photos involved.   Tip: Most copiers today like to show off their color capabilities, and will default to color scanning, which can devastate your storage, email, or document repository.

Document Capture Workflow Management
19Nov

3 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Business Processes

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

Three Technologies that Can Provide Immediate Efficiency and Productivity Improvements

There are so many applications out there on the street that tout “Instant ROI”, “Immediate Efficiency” and “Enhanced Productivity”.   But really, when you get down to it, do they really deliver?  In the world of document automation, there are some key focal points that can provide immediate value, and most of them revolve around paper and process.  So here is a list of the “Big 3”:

Document Capture – “The Filing Assistant”

In a previous life, my office was right outside our records area, a vast paper wasteland, with over 60 file cabinets.  I used to watch one of our administrators walk back and forth all day, filing new paperwork, creating new folders, and filing away an endless stream of paper.  Think of document capture software as an efficient clerk, that takes a scanned document, identifies where it needs to go, what folder it needs to go to, and how it needs to be named.  With document capture, most customers see a 25-75% reduction in time to file paper documents, immediately.

Document Management – “The Electronic Filing Cabinet”

In that same previous life, traffic flowed all day, back and forth to the filing area, as administrators would look for paper records, sometimes make a copy, and then walk back to their desk.  All departments would be seen: Contracts, Service, IT, Finance, etc.   In steps document management, where you can access files from your desk in an instant.  No longer do you put customers on hold to find out some information.   Document distribution is a snap, and now you can easily email or fax documents from within your digital filing interface.  Huge time savings, improvement in customer service and many other benefits can be gleaned immediately.

Document Workflow – “The Electronic Inbox & Outbox”

–Ah, the messy paper desk.  Walk into your accounting or HR department sometime and just take a peek at what sits on the desktop.  Usually it is a mass of paper and folders, being manually processed, reviewed, signed, and then moved on through the organization.   In steps electronic workflow.  Working hand-in-hand with capture and your repository, now documents can be easily sent to individuals for review or approval.  Business rules are now built right in to the system.  Need to route all expenses over $1000 to a manager, it’s a snap.

Spool FIle Management and Reporting
18Nov

AS400 Spool Files: Cracking the Code

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

 

Easily Manipulate AS/400 Spool Files

Are you looking to break up and convert a spool file to PDF or Excel format or improve your AS/400 reports by processing and outputting an AS/400 spool file with conditions in the text?

If you depend on complex spool file data to generate your business documents, such as invoices, purchases orders, bills of lading, etc., then you are faced with many different reporting challenges. There are ways that you can work with the spool file output without hand coding and tedious development effort. inFORM Decisions, SmartRouterTM, can be used to facilitate complex filtering and distribution requirements for IBM i spooled reports, forms and business documents, as well as, controlling the bursting and processing of spool files by individual page based on user-defined criteria. The solution can easily and intelligently sort, burst, re-bundle and deliver spool content to any defined target: email address, fax address, Printer Output Queue, the IFS, or any mapped or cloud drive in a PDF format

iSeries reporting challenge:

The spool file data does not contain all of the information you need on your business document.

Solution:

SmartRouter can include any combination of DB2 data, external spool file attributes, internal spool file content and targets for accurate implementation of unique or complex output requirements. Conditional spool file mapping can easily determine where on the page to include that data. Or simply add text to the iSeries spool file, that can be used as a trigger or mapped and printed.

 

iSeries reporting challenge:

The spool data output is long and you only need a portion of that data for your business document.

Solution:

Instead of printing and sending unnecessarily large business documents, reduce the output on the page through useful prompts to quickly define custom conditions. Split out, process, regroup and distribute individual pages of a spool file in order to expedite delivery of business forms, reports and other documents.

iSeries reporting challenge:

How do I convert spool to PDF or Excel format ?

Solution:

Utilizing iDocs and SmartRouter,  you can convert AS/400 spool file into PDF. PDF documents are intelligent text, so all text is searchable. You can even turn spool file data into html, Text, or ZIP formats. Documents can be burst, sorted collated and routed to email recipients or posted to a storage location for web access.

 

Related keywords: as400 to excel, As400 excel, spool file in as400, iSeries document management, As/400 excel, iseries excel

Searchable PDF with OCR
17Nov

Are Your PDFs in SharePoint Missing Something?

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

Making Sure Your PDFs Are Optimized with Metadata

 

PDFs are the standard in most organizations for archiving files as records.   Whether you are scanning paper files to SharePoint for long-term archival, spooling your print files to PDF or converting your Office documents to PDF / A for long-term storage, there are some key things you need to know.  From a scanning perspective, most scanners just produce an image based TIFF/PDF, barren if you will of all metadata.  PDFs are a rich format that can become a long-term “suitcase” of metadata for storage and information.  Here are some tips on how to make your PDFs complete records:

1.  Make sure your Document Capture Software supports the PDF /A standard.  PDF /A is a long-term archive standard for image files.  It ensures the viability of the file in the long-term, allows embedding of metadata and can prevent alteration of the record.  This is a must for any long-term archival of documents.  For a summary on the PDF Archive standard, see Adobe’s summary PDFs for Long Term Archive

2.  Populate the Standard PDF Headers.  When creating a PDF through a document capture or conversion process, make sure you populate the PDF headers with metadata.  The standard headers include: author, subject, keywords and title.  Populating these fields can speed up searching and indexing, and makes sure critical information is secured about the record.  Below is an example of an invoice that was scanned with a document capture application (iCapture), where the standard headers were packed with PDF information:

PDF Headers in SHarePoint

PDF Standard Headers

3.  Build Complete Custom Headers for SharePoint Metadata.  Advanced conversion software will build out custom PDF header information, and allow you to “tag” your documents.   With this, the PDF can now become a redundant container for SharePoint Metadata column information with column name and metadata values.  This is the ultimate in metadata packing, and creates a true portable PDF with all pertinent information.  Below is an example of custom headers or properties, where invoice number, date, total and vendor are entered:

SharePoint PDF Custom Data

PDF Custom Metadata

4.  Always use OCR to create text and image PDFs .  Using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process will convert the image in the PDF into searchable text that can be crawled by SharePoint for the ultimate in searchability.  This is a must for all documents.

 

Did I miss anything?  Please comment with anything I missed.

Paperless Office Tips
06Nov

5 Tips for a Successful Paperless Project

Written by Ken Kramer. Posted in Blog

Tips on Creating a Paperless Environment

So in our previous article, The Paperless Office: Is It Just a Dream, we discussed some statistics, and the key reasons why organizations don’t move towards an environment with less paper.  In this post, we will discuss key focus areas for Paperless Project Success.  Below are 5 Tips to Follow:

  • Start Small and Grow – all too often I see organizations with broad reaching goals, and huge projects.  Pick a key pain point, create a successful solution, learn you lessons and grow.
  • Focus on Simplicity – technologists like to use a sledgehammer to pound in a nail.  Always, always, use building blocks and start with the simplest solution that provides the maximum value.
  • Find a Champion – forcing a project on an unwilling participant is always a recipe for failure.  Find the person with the most paper pain in your organization and get full buy in.
  • It’s About the Users – the technology will work, it is proven, but the biggest barrier you will face is user adoption.  Time after time, I have seen users that just refuse to use scanning technology, and managers that let them.  Educate, train and encourage.
  • Track Success – building an internal case study with gains in efficiency and productivity, as well as cost savings is key.  Once you have success, promote and expand.

These are some tips that can be used in the implementation of any paperless technology:  advanced capture and scanning, digital forms, digital workflow/business process management, print to PDF or a digital archive.  Want more info on these technologies?  See our presentation on Key Tech for Paperless.  Thoughts?