In Victor's earlier post entitled: Is There A Simple Way to Define Enterprise Document Management, “Capture” is identified as the first phase in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) process.
Content is simply any information being produced and received by an organization on a day to day basis.
In the ROI of Enterprise Content Management, I noted that “unstructured” content is growing at roughly 200% annually. This flood of content includes invoices, purchase orders, waybills, emails, spreadsheets, videos, contracts, agreements etc.
This free form content lives in various places including file folders, some one’s brief case, filing cabinets, banker boxes, various file server folders, your employees hard drives and email inboxes – among other places.
According to statistics from PricewaterhouseCoopers, companies on average spend $20 in labor costs to file a document and as much as $120 in labor to find a misfiled document. Companies typically lose one out of every 20 documents and spend 25 hours reproducing it at an average cost of $220 per document.
As a result, many of our capture projects focus on the digitization of paper documents in order to cut costs and improve productivity. There are other driving factors such as compliance and automation as well.
It’s more than just digitizing a document. It’s about extracting the data from that document and placing it into other systems that are integral to your business processes. The diagram below helps illustrate this point.
Forms and documents are scanned and key pieces of information are captured, indexed and imported into key systems. Those that are used to operate your business and manage information productively, particularly in the areas:
To start, you need to decide what you should and what you shouldn’t capture. Capture information that is critical to the success and health of your business. There are generally a core group of documents that house this information. They may be waybills, government forms, purchase orders, forms filled out and signed by your customers. These are the documents that you should consider capturing.
Virtually any content can be captured so that the information can be better used, stored, accessed and managed. What forms or documents piling up on your desk should be captured?
Alfredo De Vanna is CTO of Yakidoo. He has over 10 years of international experience deploying over 80 critical information technology and enterprise content management systems. He is fluent in English and Spanish.
