The Fujitsu Imaging Products Group (IPG) Demo and Education Lab

Posted on November 13 by Kevin

This was a self-imposed project that I was very proud of. In 2007 while working at Fujitsu I took the initiative, and was gratefully given the authority, to organize, prepare and build what I called the “Fujitsu Imaging Products Group (IPG) Demo Lab”. The concept was to setup various solutions that utilized our document scanning technologies for educational purposes.

The project was really great because people were really interested in learning about emerging technologies. I didn’t have to spend any money on building this Demo Lab. All the equipment was excess. We created an internal web portal that people could log on and follow the easy instructions to understand, and try for themselves, the different technologies.

Much of our Demo Lab was dedicated to network-attach solutions so we had many networking hardware products such as Kofax DSS, Axis or Silex but we also had network software solutions such as Network ISIS and RemoteScan TWAIN. It was really great to share this knowledge with others and get such great feedback.

Bella’s health, elections and ‘the cloud’ – 10/17/16

Posted on October 17 by Kevin

Bella’s health scare

Brandee (wife), Jackson (our dog) and I had a real scare with Bella (our cat) the past few days and we’d like to report a happy road-to-recovery. First of all, Bella has been extremely anxious over the past one year or so and extremely aggressive towards our dog, Jack, and we attribute it most likely to Feline Dementia.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bella, had a hard fall. She likes to jump into our shower/bathtub for whatever reason and on this particular occasion she didn’t quite make the leap over the tub wall and crashed to the floor. It seemed innocent enough but got both Brandee’s and my attention immediately. We watched her for about 10 minutes without any obvious problems but then she went into something like a seizure-like state where her legs were moving uncontrollably. It was very scary.

Awful, yet reasonable, thoughts were racing through Brandee and my heads such as ‘did she break a leg?’, ‘did she break her back?’, ‘did she get a concussion?’. After a few more minutes of observation she was agitated enough to want to walk on her own and we determined that a fracture of the leg or back was not likely. However, something like bumping her head, like a football concussion, which is neurological might have caused a sudden onset of these seizure-like symptoms. Over that night was one of the longest ever for both Brandee and me with worry for Bella. She was very lethargic, had lack of mobility, no desire to eat/drink…it was awful.

https://www.facebook.com/kevin.neal/videos/10210792503194381/

Bella is only 14-years old and due to her feral upbringing we are always especially concerned when anything happens to her as I’ve heard life-expectancy might be less than non-feral cats. However, I’m glad to report that after a vet-visit yesterday afternoon, and an anxious night for Brandee and I, that the vet’s prescription of a mild pain-killer/sedative has made Bella a happy kitty again. We love our Doctor so much! Dr. Nagle is awesome!

American passion for elections

With less than one month until the American elections, passions, opinions and even out-right hatred is nearly at the boil-over moment. From my personal perspective I know this particular election is extremely important and I think most people would agree. And, also, while I have my own strong opinions on certain topics I would never blame anyone that might disagree with me. After all, our system of Government is supposed to be a democracy and reasonable people can, and should, have reasonable debates. So, therefore as the election nears I will continue to advocate about topics I care deeply for, yet I respect everyone’s opinion to agree, disagree or not care. All that I would ask is that if you do have an opinion, please make it an informed decision. That’s all I want to say about this topic for now – I’ll take my 5^th Amendment right now to not incriminate myself on this blog post and take-a-knee.

Cloud Business

Whether you know me personally or professional, most of you know that I have been a huge advocate of ‘cloud computing’ before it was socially or professionally acceptable like it is nowadays. I’ve had to endure the abuse of some of my seriously naïve co-workers with such criticism as ‘the cloud is not secure’ or ‘the cloud is just the internet re-branded’ or, my personal favorite, ‘no one can make money in the cloud’. These are the people that love the status-quo and refuse to go outside of their comfort zones even when a mega-trend like ‘cloud computing’ was raining on their traditional businesses. Personally I enjoy the criticism in the early days of ‘cloud computing’ because it really forced my thinking to be critical. The criticism made me really contemplate my professional career and I’m glad I made the decision to dive head-first into this cloudy future. As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, famously once said the following:

“This is the heyday of the Cloud. This is the Renaissance. We are in the Great Time.”

“So we’re still at the very, very beginning.

We are in the first innings of Cloud Computing.

This is still the Renaissance.”

My career and my business is in an excellent position to capitalize on the big momentum for cloud applications and services. We are building an outstanding network of like-minded individual’s as well as technology partners. It is truly an exciting time to be building such an exciting future!

LinkedIn Endorsements – Love ‘em or Hate ‘em?

Posted on January 10 by Kevin

Whether you love them or hate them, I think LinkedIn Endorsements are a fairly good gauge of your professional skills, and especially your online professional persona. I promised myself that after my personal LinkedIn profile achieved (99+) Endorsements in any particular category then I would share some of my honest observations on the topic of LinkedIn Endorsements.

I checked a few of my LinkedIn contacts at random and viewed their Endorsements. Knowing all these persons in various capacities whether it be only virtually, in-person or a mixture of both, I can say that most of these persons highly ranked Endorsements personified their professional skills fairly decently. In other words, LinkedIn Endorsements might not deserve the harsh criticism they received when initially launched about one year ago.

Are Skills Perception or Reality? (…and does it matter as long as it is accurate)
Let’s dig a bit deeper and see if LinkedIn Endorsements are truly representative of one’s professional skills. As a reference, my personal LinkedIn Skills & Endorsements screen print as of 1/10/16 is listed to the left. As you can see the three Skills for which I have 99+ Endorsements are ‘SaaS’, ‘Enterprise Software’ and ‘Cloud Computing’.

With over 100 of my professional contacts ‘endorsing’ me for each skill, (without asking or any sort of encouragement) anyone that didn’t know me personally would think that my entire career might have been in the solutions and software business.

Au contraire! (On the contrary)

I have never worked one minute for a ‘SaaS’ (as-a-Service) company. Never have I received a paycheck ever from any ‘Cloud Computing’ organization. Nor have I been a part of an ‘Enterprise Software’, until the past few years. So what does this mean exactly? Are all my Endorsements bogus, or is it misguided individuals or is it blatant propaganda? None of this – let me explain.

Where there is smoke, there is (professional) fire!

Passion for work, industry and others is I’m sure where my Endorsements came from. People know Kevin Neal as an extremely passionate professional about the topics of SaaS, Enterprise Software and Cloud Computing. I don’t hide this passion; in fact I embrace it and wish to share experiences with others with such interests.

* I am a proud Professional Member of AIIM (aiim.org) – A nonprofit educational organization of the topic of Information Management

* I am honored to be a ‘Expert Blogger’ on the topic of ‘Capture’ for AIIM’s web communities

* I genuinely enjoy using my personal time sharing my knowledge freely with others and with no expectations in-turn. A few examples are below:

- SaaS:
- Enterprise Software:
- Cloud Computing:

In summary, my professional life is an open book which I am glad to share with others. I feel it is a pay-it-forward type attitude for those that have helped me so much in my personal career. I can’t thank them enough and I would just encourage others to do the same. Share your experiences, express your thoughts and have an opinion.

Capture begins with process

Posted on October 3 by Kevin

Capture begins with process

As a prelude to an upcoming series of blog posts I will be posting on the topic of “Building an effective capture solution” I wanted to preface these posts and focus on the question of ‘where do I start if I want to build an effective capture solution?’.

More education, less self promotion

With information capture being such an obvious way to decrease operational costs, increase efficiency, reduce risk and assist with compliance, then it begs the question of why wouldn’t everyone be using capture? I think the answer lies in the fact that as an industry we have done a dis-service to our community. Every vendor’s product is the best *sarcasm*. Everyone can offer the complete solution *eyeroll*. Vendors compete for business on a list of features instead of a genuine desire to assist their customers become more productive *disgust*. Of course this is a generalization and not every vendor, or person, is so self-centered but my point is that a resource such as the AIIM community, which is rich in educational information and maintains a genuine vendor-neutral stance, are too few and far between. We need to breakdown the components of a capture solution to their lowest common denominator and share with others how to achieve an effective capture solution so that everyone can benefit from a technology that has a proven track record of success. Breaking down the components of a capture solution involves three basic parts: User Interface, Processing and Storage. It’s really that simple. Of course this is an oversimplification but those are the basic three components.

Eating my own dog food

Having spent nearly my entire professional career in the document capture/ECM industry you would think that someone like me might suggest that a ‘solution’ starts with consideration of capture hardware or capture software. Not true. An effective capture solution, to the contrary, does not start with capturing information from an image. Rather it starts with a well-defined process. Capture is an extension of a process that makes things more efficient.

To give some specific examples I would like to provide four different business processes and breakdown the ‘Activity’, as it might happen in a manual process, and the ‘Benefit’, which is the result of what we are trying to achieve. You will notice, while it’s pretty obvious, that the ‘Activity’ in each case can be slow, costly and inefficient yet many organizations continue to operate in this fashion because it’s the traditional way of doing business. However, if you truly consider the ‘Benefit’ and know that in each ‘Process’ example below there are well established document capture solutions that can drastically improve these processes then hopefully this will drive more adoption of such a fantastic technology:

Process	Activity	Benefit
Contact Management	Typing the information from a Business Card into Contact Relationship database	You want to be able to organize and retrieve contact details
Expense Management	Entering the information from a receipt into an Accounts Payable system	You want to get reimbursed for your expense
Invoice Management	Manual Data Entry of vendor, terms and total information into ERP application	The organization would like to realize pre-pay discounts
Inventory Management	Keying the line item details from a Packing List into inventory system	The business can be more efficient by making product available for sale quicker

Building an effective capture solution:

Part 1 of 3 (User Experience/Device/Interface)
Part 2 of 3 (Capture/Processing/Transformation)
Part 3 of 3 (Storage/Business Policy/Workflow)

Your killer SaaS app

Posted on September 20 by Kevin

Is your SaaS value proposition convincing enough without automatic data entry?

Imagine you’ve just created the next ‘killer’ Software as a Service (SaaS) app and you are absolutely convinced your new software service is going to revolutionize a particular industry or solve a significant pain point for organizations all over the world. You create some compelling sales and marketing materials with a heavy emphasis on Return on Investment. After all, you have conviction that your service is going to help businesses decrease operational costs, improve worker productivity and provide much better access to information which all translates to achieving tangible payback on your customer’s technology investment.

So you’ve done your research, you’ve developed the software application; you created awesome marketing materials, assembled a sales team and created a terrific support structure but for some reason your totally revolutionary SaaS application just isn’t selling as well as you had hoped. Do you think that you might be overlooking a feature or function that is so fundamental to providing tangible Return on Investment that customers simply cannot say “No” to immediately deploying your innovative solution?

Time is money

I might really be overstating the obvious but employers pay employees to work, not do data entry. Whether your core expertise is in accounting, customer service or mechanical, your employer pays you to spend a majority of your time focusing on your respective skills. However, organizations often overlook the total amount of time that is consumed with such tedious activities such as manually entering data from a bank statement into an accounting system. Or how many total hours field service technicians are spending collecting and entering work order data into an ERP system. These are real, tangible costs that the organization is paying. This directly relates to unrealized business productivity and effects the financial bottom-line significantly. Time is money and time utilized manually entering data into systems is, quite frankly, a waste.

Use cases for Information Capture

Let’s take a look at a few use case scenarios and focus on Mobile Information Capture, specifically, since there is a lot of interest in this area and there is an abundance of data to support that this is one of the greatest opportunities to achieve quick return on investment.

First, consider the industry of Field Service technicians. According to a November 2011 study by Dave Wood of Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) entitled “A Study of the Mobile Capture Marketing in the United States”, he cites DF Blumberg Associates as sizing the Field Service market at $225 billion in 2011 and growing to $500 billion by 2018 with nearly half of the 3 million workers using mobile productivity solutions by then. Since a good majority of these mobile devices will most likely be equipped with a camera this translates directly into a great opportunity to provide these workers with the ability to nearly effortlessly snap pictures of objects such as work order signatures, checks for payment, assessment photos or even invoices and then automatically have the data extracted from these images to populate database fields in a Field Service SaaS application. Just to name a few of the Field Service benefits for Mobile Capture could be enhanced customer service, the ability to realize the payments quicker and, of course, improve overall worker efficiency.

In a second use case scenario, also taking data from the same Mobile Capture Market survey, consider the Transportation industry. For the survey, they focused on Long Haul Trucking. They found that this particular market featured 1.9 million trucks and 1.7 million deliveries daily. The research showed that each delivery generated a packet of documents that must be captured for invoicing, with an average of 5 pages per packet. This translated into a total capture volume of this market of 8.5 million documents PER business day. The types of items that needed to be captured will slightly vary depending on the particular trucking organization, yet generally documents such as Bills of Lading, Trip Sheets, Scale Tickets and Vehicle Expense Receipts were common amongst most organizations. After some calculation of the projected number of drivers that will have access to dedicated scanners or multifunction devices, the survey predicted that approximately 400,000 drivers will have only smart phones as their primary capture device. This presents a terrific opportunity to capture all these documents DURING the trip instead of waiting until the trip is complete which could be days, or even weeks later.

The last use case scenario shared by the HSA survey was general Capture to Cloud. This was predicted to be, by-far, the largest growth opportunity for Mobile Capture and anyone would be hard pressed to argue this prediction. With the prediction of 2 billion smart phones by 2018 and cloud storage vendors competing like crazy for market share, it only stands to reason that these factors are going to contribute to huge growth for Capture to Cloud applications using mobile devices.

Bringing easy to use, yet highly-effective Ubiquitous Information Capture into the mix

Now that you have your killer SaaS app ready for prime-time. Your story is polished and you are earning business because your SaaS application is addressing customer pain points such as decreasing operational costs, improving worker productivity and providing better access to information. You can prove, without a doubt, a tangible Return on Investment with reduced labor costs associated with manual data entry and you recognize the unbelievable potential in the Mobile Capture market, so the question begs, ‘what do you do to make your SaaS application even more appealing to potential customers?’

‘Add Data Capture to you SaaS’ is the answer. It’s really that simple. The technology has evolved over the past couple years so that the technology offers extremely advanced features and functions that are completely transparent to the users themselves. This helps achieve a pleasant user experience which helps drive adoption of the solution among users. Additionally, the behind-the-scenes technology is performing tasks traditionally done by humans so the processing is highly effective from an automation standpoint. The user simply snaps a picture and this technology can automatic recognize the type of document and will intelligently extract all the information from the image.

With this new Data Capture capability not only will your SaaS application provide a much more elegant user experience but you can absolutely guarantee cost savings to your customers with the quantifiable amount of time that is recouped by not having users do manual data entry. The benefits of your SaaS can be incrementally increased with this new Data Capture capability. Overall you can offer a truly appealing ROI story before you even being to discuss all the wonderful capabilities of your particular application. The additional features are just like icing on the cake to solidify the sale.

Total Hours x Dollars per Hour = Tangible Cost Savings

This helps achieve a few things in your favor as the preferred software vendor of choice:

* Encourages your customers to make a quicker decision on purchase and implementation of your solution because every day they choose not to make a decision they are squandering money and resources
* Helps differentiate your application from competitors with valuable business functionality that makes the user experience much more enjoyable and helps drive higher adoption rates
* The likelihood of selling more subscriptions to your customers is higher because they can justify adding more licenses due to the fact that they have proven ROI

So, are you ready to take your killer SaaS app to the next level with Ubiquitous Information Capture?

Kevin's Barnhouse

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Category Archives: Cloud

The Fujitsu Imaging Products Group (IPG) Demo and Education Lab

Bella’s health, elections and ‘the cloud’ – 10/17/16

Capture begins with process