By Emma Isichei, Worldwide Category Director, Capture Solutions at Kodak Alaris
This is the age of the web. The Internet is like electricity. It can drive really powerful solutions. With technology advances in cloud, mobile and social, the paradigm shifts in information management have and are moving fast – to the web. The advantages are huge. Web-based capture will be a game changer for growth and survival of organizations in the Middle East. The advantages are HUGE!!
Digitisation – the first step to digital transformation
We continue to see a relentless rise in the volumes of information, with increasing communication channels deluging organizations. Despite the expanding diversity of incoming information, many businesses are still largely dependent on paper-based inputs despite attempts to shift to paperless processes. Paper is a major hurdle in unlocking the power of documents.
Extracting content is laborious and time consuming for staff. Manual extraction of data can result in errors, missing or overlooked information, and slow and inefficient business processes. Plus it puts cost pressure on meeting profitability goals. Transactions that are fully or partially paper-based are also key concerns. Access and document manipulation are particularly difficult to track when they are managed in a manual process.
Paper is a good place to start thinking about digital transformation, because it is the Achilles heel of most organizations. Paper clogs up processes. Paper creates disruptions to smooth information flows. Digital processes require digital information.
Digital transformation is crucial. Yet, at the same time organisations often work at different speeds and there still is a lot of work from the pure digitisation perspective. There are many hurdles to take, depending on the industry, company culture, type of customers and more contextual elements.
It’s clear: to achieve digital transformation in any area, it’s essential to start with digitisation and scanning to speed up your business and processes. To truly transform the way we conduct business, interact with customers, move to agile working models, get smarter about data and even transform our business models, the digitisation of the information and processes, required to achieve those higher goals, needs to happen – and continue to be optimised.
Web Capture – Addressing challenges, evolutions and emerging realities
Information cannot just be captured. We want to ensure that we make our information work for us within our business systems. The old adage ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ holds true when it comes to data capture. If there is no proper process when it comes to capture, then the data that comes out at the other end will not be intelligible and can possibly result in a wrong business decision being made, which in turn can be detrimental to the business.
The simple capture, file, synch and share is not enough. We need to be able to capture, index and automatically key data, so the information becomes active for a company and it can be used to drive the business, rather than becoming part of a pool of ‘dark data’. This is data which the company has but does not really know what it is, so just becomes ‘dead’. Capture also needs to be able to be done from different locations and sources.
Many businesses today have shifted their scanning workflows to capture information wherever it enters the business. However, images of these documents are often just digitally archived. No data is extracted and seamlessly inserted directly into the business process.
Web-based capture, sometimes referred to as cloud capture or thin client capture, is the game changer for capture in the hyper-connected age. The Web knows no limits: capture via a browser, from within a line of business application or using a smartphone – place, time and device become function of your business, customers, workers and processes instead of limitations to your capture possibilities.
The benefits of Web-based Capture
•Capture faster and closer to the source, the customer and the workflow than ever, speeding up processes, improving security/accuracy and enhancing customer experience.
•Web-based capture doesn’t require any software to be installed on computers and thus enables connecting each workstation or other device to the scanning solution.
•Browser-based capture enables tapping fully into the potential of distributed capture, among others by simplifying the infrastructure.
•A better match for today’s decentralised businesses, work environments and business processes/functions where speed and “always on” are essential.
•Enhanced knowledge worker and mobile worker productivity. Less time and costs wasted as workers can capture the documents they need in the scope of their responsibilities and are closer to the digitised content they require to do their work – anytime, anywhere.
•Web-based apps can be deployed fast and cheap while allowing central management by IT, making it easier and faster to deploy software updates, standardise processes, control regulatory compliance and enhance security (e.g. user profiles, audit trails,…).
In conclusion, Web-based capture is the way forward for organizations on the road to digital transformation – digitising documents anytime, anywhere and across all devices.
