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Forms Processing and Data Capture

Forms Processing is a proven technology that allows organizations of all sizes to benefit by improving efficiency and decreasing operational costs.  There are many case studies available online to support these facts.  When implemented properly the cost of a Forms Processing solution can easily be justified with a tangible 12-18 month return on investment.  With such overwhelming evidence of decreased operational costs and drastically improved efficiency then a logical question would be why wouldn’t every business in the world be using this wonderful technology?  Traditionally only large organizations with dedicated technical staff and humungous IT budgets could consider implementing a sophisticated Data Capture solution but times are changing.  No longer does it have to take years to realize the benefits of Forms Processing once only available to Fortune 1000 type companies.  In this blog post I hope to dispel the myth that this useful technology is only available to Enterprise organizations. Continue reading

File Conversion for Box secure cloud storage and collaboration

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.

  Continue reading

You have entered… The ‘No Folder Zone’

Group_Business_384x210Despite 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 reading

Cloud and Mobile = Perfect Synergies

   

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Would you ever put a cart before a horse?  Would the “cloud” market be thriving without the drastic explosion of mobile computing?

My point is does it really matter whether the chicken or the egg came first?  You can’t have chickens without eggs and without chickens you can not produce eggs.  They are a complete synergy.  Naturally you would not put a cart before a horse because the horse is needed to pull the cart.  They also are a complete synergy.  Just like cloud and mobile are a perfect synergy.  My prediction is that interest in “cloud” would not be nearly what it is today without mobile.  After-all, hosted applications have been around a long time.  What’s new is that people can afford mobile devices for personal use, bandwidth is more available and the overall experience is much better than a few short years ago. Continue reading