Analysts now see document capture as an important, growing market, however, many organizations and business leaders don’t see how it can be directly applied to deliver a range of practical benefits to the enterprise. This paper considers what motivates organizations to use capture technology, examines specific use cases and highlights some key case studies of successful document capture implementations.

The Less Paper Businesses Use, the More Problematic it BecomesResolving the Paper Paradox Through Capture Technology

Table of Contents

The Paper Paradox. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Tell Tale Signs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Why Are Organizations Becoming More Capture Capable? . . . . . . . 4

Implementing Capture to Support Business Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Capture to Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Capture to Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Capture to Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Resolving the Paper Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

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The Paper Paradox

Document capture technology has been around for over 30 years, yet analysts today are classifying it as an emerging technology. Given organizations’ broad and ongoing efforts to reduce the use of physical documentation along with expenses related to its storage and handling, how can a decades-old technology be called an emerging technology and experience a resurgence in both popularity and necessity? The fact is, despite organizations’ best efforts, paper is still alive and in many cases—such as with legal requirements in the banking and insurance industries—necessary. The US, for example, spends $25-35 billion per year filing, storing and retrieving paper1 while the average EU office worker in 2013 used between 16 and 45 sheets of paper per day.2 This means that while paper reduction policies continue, more existing documents must be made digitally accessible, shareable, and searchable, leading to what we might call “the paper paradox”: the fact that paper-based barriers within organizations are increasing even though paper volumes are generally decreasing.

Tell Tale Signs

The paradox manifests itself in three ways:

1 Despite the shrinking amount of paper still residing in the enterprise, it has become a bigger problem than ever. When paper was the standard, all processes were paper-based and everything moved at the same speed. In today’s environments, where internal process-es are increasingly digital, paper can create major processing challenges and slow down enterprise systems substantially. So, even though there’s less paper, reducing it further is a growing operational imperative that, according to AIIM research, can yield significant payback.3

2 Despite more and more documents becoming electronic, certain processes—such as onboarding, applying for online banking or getting initial physical validation for elec-tronic signatures—still start with paper forms being filled out to initiate the process. As a result, the physical movement of paper from place to place to enable manual inputting remains significant and costly.

3 Capture’s re-emerging popularity and demonstrable value is, in many ways, no longer even about paper. The technology has gone far beyond document scanning and is now as much about extracting metadata (individual pieces of important data such as vendor names or invoice total) as it is about simple archiving or reducing paper volumes. This capability is beyond the scope of OCR or scanning, but the development of IDR tech-nologies that enable any document to be used in a range of enterprise systems and platforms is pushing capture’s value resurgence.

CASE STUDY HIGHLIGHT

One of Canada’s largest federally regulated trust companies deployed OpenText Capture Center to completely digitize the over five million documents it receives per year and streamline its internal loan application processes.

KEY TERMINOLOGY

• Capture: The process of acquiring documents for an ECM (enterprise content management) system or a business process

• Scanning: The process of converting a paper document into an electronic document

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Intelligent technology that converts pixels into coded characters that can be read by computers

• ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition): Intelligent technology similar to OCR with the added capability of hand print recognition

• IDR (Intelligent Document Recognition): Intelligent technology for characterizing, classifying, and extracting specific data from documents (for example, a case number from a customer letter)

1 Ronan Lavelle. “Only 1% of EU businesses achieve a paperless office” (17 January 2014). Accessed at http://realbusiness.co.uk/article/25232-only-1-of-eu-businesses-achieve-a-paperless-office on June 2, 2014. 2 WRAP. “Green Office: A Guide to Running a More Cost-effective and Environmentally Sustainable Office” (May 2013) Accessed at http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/WRAP_Green_Office_Guide.pdf. on June 12, 2014. 3 Lavelle. “Only 1% of EU businesses . . .”.

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Why Are Organizations Becoming More Capture Capable?

Certainly archiving remains a strong driver for adopting document capture technology. The growing need to apply data extraction and process integration capabilities to electronic documents such as PDFs, images, and scanned and mobile-generated documents only increases the technology’s importance. For computer applications, the content of scanned documents or faxes is an unreadable collection of meaningless pixels. To automatically store documents within a repository and assign them accurate, searchable attributes, relevant metadata must be extracted and the type of document identified. To retrieve the document, having its full text available to search is an asset, especially when an organization faces legal challenges.

Similarly, to populate business transactions with information and automatically trigger business processes, relevant content data from the documents must be available. This means organizations need the ability to capture documents of all kinds and extract embedded data. The ongoing development of OCR, ICR and IDR technology is meeting this challenge, enabling the development of end-to-end capture solutions where virtually any kind of document can be captured, rendered as text and its data made available to a range of applications, platforms, business workflows, and transactions.

The flow of data within the enterprise is only going to increase, and organizations are rife with systems and processes that can be streamlined, better integrated, and automated using document capture technology. These gains can be realized in areas as far-ranging as customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), insurance claims processing, expense processing and eDiscovery.

Implementing Capture, to Support Business Needs

When capture solutions are implemented within enterprise functions, we can distinguish three specific methodologies that build incrementally on each other’s capabilities: capture to archive, capture to workflow and capture to process.

CASE STUDY HIGHLIGHT

Challenged by having to store over 30,000 doctor’s certificates for employee health claims every year, one of the world’s largest chemical companies implemented OpenText Capture Center. They now process up to 300 certificates a day automatically and are achieving significant cost savings along with improvements in efficiencies, accuracy, and accessibility.

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Capture to Archive

Capture to archive is the most fundamental application of document capture technology and is associated with the well-known process of converting paper, by scanning, into electronic documents for storage.

Metadata is applied to documents to ensure easy searchability and to create a link to the original paper documents, a key advantage if you need to retrieve either version for legal or compliance reasons. Some jurisdictions legally define under which circumstances paper may be destroyed after scanning and when an electronic document is legally equivalent to paper. This may involve attaching an electronic signature to the document to prove that the pixels have not changed since being scanned. You will normally scan documents as searchable PDFs, which makes them more valuable when they need to be searched based on content or when content needs to be copied or pasted into other documents.

The digital archiving process yields major benefits, as it is the first step in the more advanced capture to workflow and capture to process procedures that follow. Solution advantages include reduced paper filing and storage costs, improved information quality through better information sharing and enhanced compliance through better preparation for any audit or litigation procedures.

Capture to Workflow

The ability to scan documents directly into their relevant business applications and workflows using a common set of business rules is a key document capture capability that can drive significant efficiencies. You can further enhance efficiency with software that can classify, index, and extract data from documents—for example, determine whether a document received by an insurance company is a claim, an invoice, or a company form containing important information.

Depending on the situation, the solution may be able to create a claims case, add the documents to that case, pre-fill certain internal forms or identify the right person to deal with that case. As with the archiving process, the document is assigned metadata to make it easily available/searchable/shareable when needed, such as for compliance.

Capture to workflow solutions deliver increased efficiencies through shorter cycle times and reduced exception processing, as well as a range of enhanced compliance capabilities, including improved auditability, more visibility into business processes and better litigation preparedness.

CASE STUDY HIGHLIGHT

A leading health and accident insurance company was processing mail using five different legacy systems. Now, one central mailbox manages all mail using OpenText Capture Center. The new system automatically presets data fields and forwards over 100 distinct document classes—including forms, reports, doctor’s bills, and lab bills—to their proper destinations, raising efficiency, improving customer satisfaction and increasing data quality.

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Capture to Process

For highly standardized processes, the goal is not only to support business workflows but to fully automate them. This is where the OCR value proposition first began to take hold, being used in applications for processing checks, invoices, and purchase orders; managing HCFA (Health Care Financing Administration) processes; tax administration and more. Recently, the scope of capture to process expanded from forms to semi-structured documents and now complements business-to-business applications for transferring business data, such as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).

The task of the software is twofold: extract all business data and create a posting record for the backend system. With this solution, you ideally never touch the document again after it is scanned. Of course, removing manual entry and using a single input management platform also delivers added efficiencies and cost savings (many organizations realize a demonstrable ROI in one to two years), and compliance risks, as with the previous solutions, are reduced.

Invoice processing is a prominent example of a capture to process application. Data like invoice number, invoice date, purchase order number, amounts and line item details can automatically be extracted with high precision. Using this data, many invoices can be posted without any human intervention. Only those invoices that need approvals or show discrepancies with the purchase order need to go to a manned workstation.

Depending on which element of the solution you use, capture technology can deliver some or all of these benefits:

$Reduce Operating Costs

• Automating manual tasks• Deploying a single input management platform• Reducing paper filing and storage

Improve Information Quality

• Improving information sharing• Leveraging a common set of business rules• Reducing errors

Accelerate Business Processes

• Shortening cycle times• Reducing exception processing• Enhancing customer relationships

Compliance

• Ensuring compliance and auditability• Improving visibility into business processes• Improving litigatation preparedness

CASE STUDY HIGHLIGHT

The finance ministry of a major global government wanted to streamline and improve their handling of individual and business tax declarations, involving millions of document pages. With OpenText Capture Center, tax forms are now scanned in and classified while intelligent search tools handle the huge variations in form design.

W H I T E P A P E RTHE LESS PAPER BUSINESSES USE, THE MORE PROBLEMATIC IT BECOMES

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Resolving the Paper Paradox

The paper paradox—the fact that paper-based barriers within organizations are increasing even though paper volumes are generally decreasing—continues to challenge IT depart-ments and business strategists. Document capture technology, however, is getting closer to making this conflict a thing of the past. Capture solutions continue to evolve to meet the changing nature of electronic documentation and imaging, to better enable information integration within enterprise applications and platforms, and to put enterprises on the cusp of finally balancing the advantages of digital information with the remaining requirements of paper documentation.

OpenText Capture Center uses advanced OCR, ICR, IDR, adaptive reading and other technologies to turn documents into machine-readable information. It then captures, interprets and automatically integrates the data content in scanned images and faxes to significantly reduce manual keying and paper handling, accelerate business processing, improve data quality, limit compliance risk and reduce costs. Far from a scan-and-convert point solution, OpenText Capture Center is a complete, end-to-end business process that captures documents and data to archives, workflows, and processes as needed.

Document capture technologies, however, can be challenging to implement and customize. Given the diversity of business platforms, capture needs and IT infrastruc-tures, out-of-the box implementation is an unlikely scenario for most organizations. Depending on your needs, there are a number of tradeoffs between functionality, performance and efficiency that need to be carefully considered and that may require third-party consultation to effectively balance.

To learn more about how OpenText capture solutions can help your organization improve efficiencies, compliance, information quality, and business processes, please contact:

Advisors@opentext.com

www.opentext.com

4 Forrester. The Forrester Wave: Multichannel Capture, Q3 2012.

INDUSTRY TRENDS

During the next five years, capture platforms will incorporate advanced analytics, mobile solutions, business process management (BPM) and case management, and stronger integration with enterprise production platforms.4