When Washington State voters passed Initiative 502, legalizing Cannabis, on November 6, 2012 the Liquor Control Board was put in charge of developing rules, regulations and policies to support the implementation of this ground breaking law. This presented a unique challenge, as there is no regulatory, operational or practical precedence for the agency to follow for managing the licensing and enforcement for the production, processing and distribution of Cannabis. To get expert assistance the agency published RFP K430 to select a consultant(s) to assist them with the process of implementing I-502.

Challenge

The RFP timeline from publication to closing was only 30 business days. Nearly one hundred vendors submitted responses, and 52 of those were accepted as qualified applicants. A team of nine evaluators from agencies across the state was formed to review and score each bid. The large number of applicants and geographical separation of reviewers made this a more challenging situation than the typical RFP review process.

The evaluation team was given ten business days to complete scoring of the bids. If standard processes for evaluating and scoring bids had been used it would have required significantly more time, duplication of documents and hundreds of emails.  Instead LCB Procurement and IT decided to take a “lean” approach to evaluating the responses. Continue

I will be hosting a discussion in New Orleans on Thursday, March 21 – 10:30

ECM Migration Roadmap

School Employees Credit Union of Washington (SECUWA) has been using FileNet for over a decade, they were one of the first Credit Unions in the country to implement document imaging in the ‘90s. The system became the second most critical business information system and is accessed by nearly every employee. When SECUWA decided it was time to find a new solution they knew it wouldn’t be an easy task. In order to accomplish the first phase of the project they hired cloudPWR to provide professional consultation and analysis. After six months of discovery and due diligence they discovered that it’s more than just selecting a new software package, more than buying new hardware and upgrading to the latest operating systems and browsers. It required a new look at the industry, an evaluation of the current business operations, and engaging in processes to incorporating key fundamentals, like records management and collaboration. Continue

Use Case:

There are many scenarios where converting an image file such as a JPG, TIFF or PDF to a different format such as DOC, XML or Searchable PDF would be extremely useful.  Below are three specific examples:

1. Expense Receipts:  XML is a useful standard to exchange information between two systems using just a network connection.  Most modern systems can ingest XML which enables easy integration possibilities without costly professional services fees.  In our use case example we capture all the details from an expense receipt including Establishment, Date, Total and all the line-item detail with easy point-and-click operation because this was the reimbursement policy of our organization.
2. Legal:  Imagine a lawyer receives a new case.  Their desire is to gather as much information as possible to best represent their client.  Through the discovery process they acquire many image-only PDF files and need to be able to find information within these image files based on keyword searches.  For this reason they would want to convert these image-only PDF files into fully Searchable PDF’s.
3. Marketing:  You are in the marketing department and you often receive image-only files that you would like to edit but you are limited to applying stick-notes in Acrobat which is not an effective process.  In this use case you can easily import these image-only files and have them converted in fully editable .DOC files in no time.

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Despite tremendous improvements in document capture technology and ease of use becoming more prevalent, the fact of the matter is that document capture is not totally automated and often involves human intervention. Therefore, careful considering the pro’s and con’s of your document capture strategy is imperative to ultimately create better operational efficiency within your organization or, unfortunately, cause unnecessary burden within your business process.

Technologies such as Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) or Automatic Forms Processing to automatically identify documents and extract information from scanned images are fairly amazing and perform highly automated functions if the system is designed with well-known document types. In other words, the information on the pages such as a invoice number is in a fairly consistent part of the page (i.e. always in the upper-right hand corner of the page). But when more and more document types are introduced to the capture system, the complexity of the system becomes exponentially more difficult and chances are that the automation accuracy will decrease. Continue

Your email footer is ridiculous and is taking up valuable space on my screen. Your company legal department requires that its appended to every email. The IT department is automating the footer so you can’t do anything about it. I can delete it when I forward it to someone, then when they forward it and no one downstream knows about the disclaimer. How do you track all this, fact is you can’t. The company is trying to limit liability and comply with federal and international laws. Is this ever really enforced? Everyone does the email ‘disclaimer’, there are even websites dedicated to helping you understand why (?) < Email Disclaimer dot com >

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