Workflow

All too often, we hear and even use terms assuming others know exactly what we mean. One term used in the document industry is workflow- but what does it mean?

According to Wikipedia

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations...

The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another.

A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, a workflow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow ) continue reading...

Everyone knows how bad the economy was this past year and this downturn caused many companies to put their IT strategies on hold. Others however, saw this as an opportunity to be proactive and begin implementing automation and moving forward with new ways of getting the job done. As we head into the New Year, look at these strategies to think about re-organizing and working smarter. continue reading...

1. Be proactive! While companies need to react quickly to industry trends and changing economic and world environments, they also need to formulate strategies for the future. Think about creating a team who will think ahead and make sure the company will get where it wants to go in the next few years.
2. Follow a business strategy roadmap. Don’t just jump blindly expecting the technology to magically work for you. Build a business strategy that will clarify and outline the issues you’re trying to solve. Be sure that your company is starting with a good foundation for their infrastructure that can be further built upon.
3. You don’t have to implement everything at once. In fact, it is much more practical automate your business according to a strategic plan—focus on what needs attention first. Look at your industry specific government regulations to see how they expect a company to handle information management.
4. Don’t wait to “play it safe” and have other companies experiment with new technology. If you stand back and wait for another company to make the first step and prove automation as a valuable investment, the next generation of technology will already have hit the business world. Your company will remain one step behind other innovating companies and will lose competitive edge.
5. Think about your return on investment (ROI). If you’re worried about staffing and hiring issues, realize that once automation is implemented, people used to working manually with documents can be re-deployed to other valuable tasks. While automation still needs staff to run it, the amount of personnel can be greatly reduced. This feeds right into the ROI. Create a flowchart and see how much faster your product can hit the market with new technology. That’s savings.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has made great progress in the fight for paperless offices. It’s become a staple component in just about any document management software.

So what is OCR? Wikipedia offers this definition: “…the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text.” (2008)

Fundamentally, a computer reads the document and creates a library of searchable information. This type of application allows an EDM solution the opportunity to build a database of text, making the search for usable information within and across documents much easier.

While many argue the accuracy levels for OCR engines can reach 98 or 99 percent, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) may find this hard to achieve with most commercially-available software. Many variables can affect the accuracy levels of output, ranging from document condition to readability.

Where problems can begin to occur is when OCR is not applied to the text contained within the scanned document, but used to lift index values themselves (e.g. customer name, number, etc.). This becomes dangerous if there are no quality assurances or stop-loss measures in place. If that is the case, it becomes likely a document will be misplaced due to a character being off here or there. continue reading...

Distributed capture has evolved with today’s business processes to incorporate paper-based information into digital workflows. Document imaging technology gives businesses the advantage to increase the amount and quality of information included in critical business systems. The integration of multifunction peripherals (MFP) have made document scanning available for the average office worker.

Whether a business wants to utilize a new distributed capture system or making improvements to its existing system, there are four key ways to ensure scanning processes are optimized to meet business needs.

Work with Your Existing Office Infrastructure.
With today’s emphasis on reducing environmental impact and cutting economic costs, it has never been more important to utilize existing IT investments in new ways. Businesses can significantly increase the value of existing systems by eliminating the need for paper-based workflows and file cabinet document storage. continue reading...

There has been a movement to incorporate new document capture technologies into businesses worldwide.  Why would you spend hours patiently keying in information from delivery tickets, sales orders and remittance stubs when you could automatically extract information from scanned documents?

How Data Capture Works 
Documents are scanned using a scanner or multifunction system and then utilizes the following technologies to read data from the document:

Zone OCR: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) converts scanned text into text that can be edited in common word applications and imported into a database.  Zone OCR reads text from a specific area of a document. 

Barcode Recognition:  Information can be read from barcodes on documents.  For example, the invoice number on your proof of delivery slips can be embedded in a barcode. When these slips are scanned, the capture software reads the barcode. continue reading...

When one thinks about threats to organizational security, the words hackers and computer viruses come to mind. In this world of network attacks, printers, copiers and fax machines are easy to overlook. These systems can store trade secrets, financial and medical information, and valuable information like customer lists or pricing schedules. Loss of this information could be devastating.

The good news is that there are practical steps you can take to improve the security of your printers and copiers.

1. Track Printing Access

Output tracking technologies can keep a record of which documents are printed. You can access the printing logs to see what documents an employee has printed. Your staff will know that the company is monitoring information security thus creating an environment where employees are hesitant to steal information through the printer.

2. Encrypt Hard Drives on Multifunction Systems

When you scan a document on a multifunction system the scanned image is stored on the device’s hard drive before it is sent off to an email address or network folder location. New security technologies can encrypt documents on the multifunction system’s hard drive and make sure files are erased after they have been transmitted. continue reading...

Source: Quocirca Business and IT Analysis

With businesses striving to find ways to increase efficiencies, lower costs and improve productivity, many are looking towards leveraging their investments in digital multifunction peripherals (MFPs) to merge their paper and digital workflows.

Whilst many businesses are moving towards digital document workflows, paper continues to play an important role in many business processes. It is now widely accepted that the paperless office anticipated by the digital age has not materialised, as glancing around any office environment will illustrate.

Growing usage of technologies like email, online collaboration and electronic documents, has driven an increase in paper consumption rather than a reduction. Paper remains the preferred choice of medium for consuming and digesting information - people prefer to read from paper rather than a screen, it is tangible and easy to annotate and is personal and portable. Despite technology advances in e-paper display technology to mimic paper readability on-screen, and e-paper reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle e-book, our attachment to paper is likely to long continue. continue reading...