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Extraction made painless

Editorial Type: Interview     Date: 03-2014    Views: 3073   







DM Editor David Tyler spoke to Frank Tiedt, Chief Sales Officer, I.R.I.S. AG, at the company's recent annual customer conference in Brussels

David Tyler: When we spoke at the last IRISLink event the Canon takeover was still in the process of completion. How would you summarise the key changes that have happened since then?
Frank Tiedt: We have separated the business into three 'sales pillars': the first is mainly focused on consumer products such as the ScanMouse, but also at times areas such as the scan client, or document services. Then there is the Canon business, where we have now set up a dedicated sales organisation to support all the sales leads related to Canon - this is challenging, as it is potentially a huge part of our business. The third pillar is the area managed by my team.

This pillar is completely 100% indirect. On one hand we work with VARs who are responsible for a full business process solution, where we are for the most part only inserting our extraction and classification expertise into their offerings - this is based on IRISXtract, or parts of it, in an OEM kind of structured approach.

Another part of the indirect channel is where we provide these kind of services to Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) - these kinds of business also have a requirement to become more efficient and competitive, of course, and to become more 'complete' in their offerings in terms of providing a full capture service to their clients. There can be widely varying levels of outsourcing business for us: one example we discussed in the conference was around conversion and compression, where there is a requirement to process and compress very high volumes of documents - not really related to a dedicated business process, but nonetheless requiring a highly professional solution. A different example is our business with ScanPoint (the Austrian mail service provider), where we provide a full capture service.

DT: The ScanPoint presentation was very interesting: a complete mailroom outsourcing offering.
FT: Exactly: if a company wants to outsource its entire paper-based and electronic invoice processing, for instance, they can ask ScanPoint to do that. They will take everything from the mailroom, re-direct any emailed invoices and faxes, digitise and extract the content, and deliver it all back electronically to the customer to feed into their process. They can also archive the documents on their clients' behalf, as well as offering workflow capabilities (invoice approvals, for instance) where required. But the customer still has its Accounts department in this situation.

Then the third - or highest - level of outsourcing involves taking over the running of an entire user department. Some very big companies like Shell and Coca Cola have already outsourced their HR and AP departments. Full service providers like HP Enterprise Services or Canon Business Services can easily offer these kinds of 'full-blown' departmental services. And the key point here is that for all these different styles of outsourcing approach, all these different types of outsourcing companies, we can integrate our capture capabilities.

DT: You mentioned Accounts Payable as a potential target for outsourcing, and of course it has long been a key market for capture - but what about Accounts Receivable? Is that an 'automatable function' yet?
FT: The market is definitely demanding this capability now. The invoice capture market is more or less covered these days, as your readers doubtless know. It is no longer a particularly challenging market sector, from a capture, extraction and classification viewpoint. Purchase Order documents tend to present much more of a challenge: the document formats are not nearly as constrained by legal or tax rules as invoice-related paperwork has tended to be. So from a classification and extraction point of view, we have to go a few steps further to do the job properly.

Just like with invoicing, this is a wide horizontal market - all companies are dealing with purchase orders in one way or another, of course, so it is potentially a huge market for automation. If you can provide the right technology to solve that issue, then that presents a huge opportunity to grow your business. We started investing in R&D around extraction of Purchase Order data around five years ago, and we currently have somewhere between 15 and 20 ongoing projects in place at different stages of maturity. Some of those started as pilots 4 years ago, so we already have a lot of experience under our belts to help us to improve our core technologies to address these issues.

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