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There is always an exception...

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 07-2014    Views: 4881   







Intelligent scanning can enable organisations to focus on exception prevention rather than exception resolution, argues Derrick Murphy, CEO of ibml.

Exceptions are the curse of document-driven business processes. Exceptions are directly responsible for cost and processing inefficiencies, potential negative customer impact, and greater risk of compliance violations as a result of incomplete or incorrect information.

Forrester Research estimates that 22 percent to 25 percent of all document-driven processes require structured collaboration or interaction between colleagues to resolve exceptions. Worse, between 8 percent and 10 percent of document processes require ad hoc interactions between colleagues to resolve exceptions, and between 3 percent and 5 percent of document processes require supervisor intervention to resolve exceptions.

While technologies such as optical character recognition and intelligent character recognition are helping organisations achieve impressive straight-through-processing rates for document-driven business processes, the costs of handling exceptions continue to have a significant impact on an organisation's overall costs. Payments-related exceptions alone cost the U.S. economy a whopping $700 million a year, according the U.S. Department of Commerce. The majority of the costs associated with exceptions resolution are labour-related, stemming from the degree of manual processes still required for managing exceptions.

LEAN AND MEAN
Organisations understand the impact of exceptions on their document-driven business processes, more so now than in the past, as they struggle to emerge from the economic malaise and increase their sales and profits through increased efficiency and improved corporate agility. At the same time, LEAN principles are fast becoming a key differentiator between service providers, delivering better processing efficiency and effectiveness that results in lower costs, improved turnaround and fewer errors for processors and their clients alike.

Traditionally, exceptions handling has been dealt with as a post-scanning problem. Images are pushed downstream from the scanner as quickly as possible and poor quality images or incorrect data must be corrected by a knowledge worker and/ or an expensive data capture or enterprise content management system. But this process likely means a more expensive person will lose productivity trying to fix it, the downstream system will produce less than stellar results, and/or the overall process will be delayed. This model also inflicts a major hidden cost on the document processing lifecycle, such as the time senior management may spend assisting in the resolution of an exception or the loss of goodwill resulting from a customer's document not being processed in a timely manner. For these reasons, organisations are rethinking the way they process documents to eliminate downstream exceptions.

The proven process solution to reducing exceptions is to deploy intelligent scanning at the point that documents enter an organisation - whether they arrive via the mailroom, a web scanner, mobile capture, e-mail, fax, or a network folder full of images. This process helps ensure optimum image quality and enables organisations to capture the data required for functions such as pre-defined business rules, and document out-sorting. All of this improves operational performance, reduces costs, and accelerates turnaround.

INTELLIGENCE GATHERING
The adjective "intelligent" is used so often these days by other scanner vendors that it risks losing any meaning. For the purposes of this article we will propose that a truly "intelligent" scanner has the following capabilities that distinguish it from conventional scanners:

• Can apply business rules automatically to documents while the scanner is running (i.e. inline), not after it stops;
• Can perform inline document recognition, classification and data extraction, eliminating the need for post scan steps;
• Uses left-justified document feeding to reduce document preparation time and reduce jams and rescans of mixed size batches; and
• Can automate the physical separation and sorting of documents and separator sheets into separate trays.



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