Author: Alfredo De Vanna, CTO and Co-founder

I’d be surprised if you didn’t agree that the only certainty today regarding our economy is uncertainty. We’re all faced with the reality that we don’t know where the economy is headed.

As business leaders this means the decisions we make need to be careful and with low to no margins for error. We all need to find and preserve cash, cut costs and improve productivity.

These are challenging times! Investing in major transformation projects, ones that can be disruptive or perceived as such, are most likely on the back burner. Who’s going to recommend something radical and put themselves at risk?

But, isn’t now the time to think differently in order to get better? Is the status quo acceptable given this time of uncertainty? Shouldn’t we strive forward and focus on improvement and making next year better?

I recently read a White Paper from AIIM and Kofax that led me to ask these questions of my business and our customers. In “Capturing Data to Multiple Business Processes – what’s holding you back?” we learned that the companies that are scanning and capturing information are saving money, improving customer responsiveness and productivity. But, a few things jumped out at me.

First, scanning to archive remains the most popular application of scanning technology. Simply put this means at some point a document is scanned and the image is electronically stored so it can be retrieved faster than a paper version. The troubling statistic is that 60% of respondents manually index these documents. This means that someone manually inputs key information from each document in order to classify and find the document. They likely manually input the data into other line of business applications like CRM, accounting and ERP systems. Indexing and inputting should now be automated with manual intervention being used for exceptions only.

Second, many organizations aren’t adopting scanning to process strategies. What does this mean though you may ask? It’s simple really. A document (electronic or paper based), such as an invoice or a lab requisition form, is an integral part of a business process. The invoice is part of the accounts payable process. The lab form is part of the service delivery process. In both cases a scan to process strategy makes it possible to capture the data from the document and automatically input it into a line of business application and store the document electronically for future access and compliance, etc. Many businesses can make their processes more efficient and information handling more reliable simply by adopting scan to process strategies.

Third, the two major barriers preventing companies from adopting scanning to process strategies are, lack of IT resources and a lack of awareness amongst line of business owners on the value of implementing the strategy. IT resources are always constrained, so this is not a surprise, nor is the lack of awareness to be honest. However, those organizations implementing scan to process projects are seeing IT resource constraints being reduced and increased productivity in the affected departments.

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