Category Archives: Capture

Building an effective capture solution – Part 1 of 3 (User Experience/Device/Interface)

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Building an effective capture solution – Part 1 of 3 (User Experience/Device/Interface)

 

In this three part series of blog posts I would like to walk you through building a highly-effective, yet extremely agile and surprisingly affordable document capture solution.  Not a piece-part of a solution, rather a complete solution from start-to-finish.

First, before any technology is ever considered the prudent thing to do is to clearly understand the use case for capture.  In other words, think of real world scenarios and carefully consider the user experience of capturing information.  The ultimate success, or failure, of the entire system can depend on whether users themselves feel comfortable with the capture experience.  If the experience is not easy, available at all times or effective then regardless of how fancy the back-end technology is, they will surely resist.

Let me give some examples of use cases and how understanding the user experience first, before considering back-end technology, will help define the proper hardware device for capture:

mobile_scanner_multifunction Use case will determine choice of capture hardware:

  • Imagine the user works in the sales department and receives various Price Lists often with many line items that they must enter into the company’s inventory management system.  In this case a dedicated document scanner is most likely a logical choice of capture device hardware because they are frequently scanning documents.
  • Next, consider the use case scenario of a traveling business person that needs to capture an image and details from an expense receipt.  In this case using a mobile device with a camera is much more convenient and practical because they only need to capture information every-so-often and, of course, a mobile device is portable.
  • Finally, in typical shared office environments where groups of users need to occasionally capture information from business documents then a shared network scanner or multifunction scanning device might be most appropriate.  These devices have higher costs so it’s not practical to put them on everyone’s desk and the size is not reasonable for a desktop.

 

After you determine the proper hardware device based on user experience the next thing you must decide on is how information will be presented to users on the hardware device.  Or, in other words, the User Interface.  There are several options and whether you choose to design your own application or source an existing application a decision should be made wisely.  The implications are tremendous, and in particular when it comes to system maintenance and scalability.

User interface considerations for an effective capture application:

  • An application that is compiled and installed on a computer depending on the developers’ preference of operating system and development environment to create this application.  This is typically one of a few flavors including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh or Linux.  This approach typically offers the most feature-rich user experience and historically been the most common method to deploy an application.
  • Web-based is a newer, popular method for creating capture applications due to the fact that web browsers are nearly ubiquitous across the various operating systems and devices; especially mobile.  Industry accepted standards such as HTML5 and XML are quite appealing for application development.  This makes supporting the widest variety of devices do-able and thus more attractive from a software development standpoint.
  • Another emerging popular option is to build a highly-effective, and extremely functional, user interface is using a Hybrid approach.  With the Hybrid user interface design this allows a developer to use both the native functions of a hardware device such as the camera on a smart phone or image processing of a scanner, yet still make the application itself open to the widest variety of devices because the application can be run in a web-browser via HTML5, for example.

 

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So, in summary, it’s critically important to take the user experience into account as an important first step in creating an effective capture solution.  Also, making the important decision early-on in your capture system architecture about user interface considerations will enable you to achieve the goals of providing efficient, cost effective tools with the ability to scale-up, or down, when necessary.

I invite you to re-visit the introductory post in this series of posts on “Building an effective capture solution” by reading my post on “Capture Begins with Process“.  Or, I invite you to continue on by reading “Part 2 of 3 (Capture/Processing/Transformation)“.

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Demystifying Forms Processing and Data Capture

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Demystifying Forms Processing and Data Capture

Forms Processing is a proven technology that allows organizations of all sizes to benefit by improving efficiency and decreasing operational costs.  There are many case studies available online to support these facts.  When implemented properly the cost of a Forms Processing solution can easily be justified with a tangible 12-18 month return on investment.  With such overwhelming evidence of decreased operational costs and drastically improved efficiency then a logical question would be why wouldn’t every business in the world be using this wonderful technology?  Traditionally only large organizations with dedicated technical staff and humungous IT budgets could consider implementing a sophisticated Data Capture solution but times are changing.  No longer does it have to take years to realize the benefits of Forms Processing once only available to Fortune 1000 type companies.  In this blog post I hope to dispel the myth that this useful technology is only available to Enterprise organizations.

While the concept of automatically extracting information from a hard copy document is not new, what is new is a different method of implementation.  Specifically, the “cloud” offers an intriguing opportunity for Data Capture.  Why?  First, Data Capture is a very CPU intensive process and the cloud offers unmatched processing power within gigantic data centers.  Second, sharing resources and ‘renting’ a cloud service such as ‘Cloud Capture’ reduces the barrier to entry.  No longer is it the case where the upfront cost to implementing Data Capture should be an issue.  The cost of Data Capture can now be a Operating Expense versus a Capital Expenditure.

I have written previously about the “No Folder Zone” and in this blog post I will elaborate on the solution to avoid using Folders as a cop-out for a truly effective Information Capture solution.  In a traditional installation environment of on-premise software.  After the Forms Processing system is installed, tuned and tested then it is ready for deployment.  This is the point where the Document Capture system Crosses the Chasm and the organization can now truly benefit from the 80% investment and turn this effort into 80% benefit.

The basics of Forms Processing are quite simple and straight-forward.  The idea is to create a template overlay of the form for which you wish to extract information.  As seen in the photo to the left, you would basically draw zones over the image where you can capture typed text (Optical Character Recognition, or OCR), handwritten text (Intelligent Character Recognition, or ICR) or even check boxes (Optical Mark Recognition, or OMR).  After the template is created then the next time the system encounters this type of form then these fields will be automatically captured and eliminate manual data entry.

One of the most important objectives of any data capture system should be the quality of the information being captured versus just the pure speed of the system.  The accuracy of information captured is based on many factors including original document quality, image enhancement or scan resolution but a critical step is to validate, or verify, any questionable data BEFORE it enters your information system.  There are many effective methods to capturing highly accurate data including logic such as a Social Security Number field should contain only numbers instead of letters and, therefore, the number “5” would not be incorrectly recognizing as a letter “S”.  In a perfect world you would hope for no verification at all but this is simply not reasonable all the time.  A good rule of thumb is that 2% verification is acceptable which means 98% of work is done for you quickly and automatically.  This translates into major efficiency gains.

A key misconceptions about Data Capture, or Forms Processing, is that the integration into back-end systems needs to be complicated or costly.  While this could be true the fact of the matter is that all electronic information systems rely on some flavor of a database.  And basically a database is composed of a bunch of tables with fields.  In context of Forms Processing think about a table of Document Types.  Then in the Document Types table you have the various types of documents you wish to capture and the Fields are the index values you wish to extract from an image.  So the real magic is “matching” the extracted index values to the fields in the database.  I think the term “Field Mapping” most accurately describes this integration of Data Capture technology with Electronic Information Systems.  Fortunately, new trends in open connectivity such as Web Services and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is making the connectivity between Capture and Storage much more affordable and less time-consuming than ever.

As I mentioned earlier in this blog post, all applications have some flavor of a database to store information.  It’s just a fact of how things operate and if you really think about it all we have to do is match Data Capture fields with database fields to make a fully integrated Data Capture solution.  Often times we get wrapped-around the axel on the technical details but when we simply integration to it’s lowest common denominator then we can truly dispel the myth that Forms Processing is too complicated or expensive for everyone to utilize.

Now that I’ve covered the basics of Forms Processing and illustrated the fact that interoperability can be achieved rather easily in certain cases, I hope that we can move out of the stone ages of manual data entry and realize a truly efficient organization with Automatic Data Capture.

AIIM has just published a whole suite of educational videos on a collection of interesting topics including one on Information Capture (http://www.aiim.org/Training/Certification/Get-Trained/Videos/Capture-Manage).

Three significant trends we witnessed in the year 2010 that is changing the Document Capture landscape forever

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The ‘No Folder Zone’

Despite tremendous improvements in document capture technology and ease of use becoming more prevalent, the fact of the matter is that document capture is not totally automated and often involves human intervention.  Therefore, careful considering the pro’s and con’s of your document capture strategy is imperative to ultimately create better operational efficiencies within your organization or, unfortunately, cause unnecessary burden within your business process.


Technologies such as Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) or Automatic Forms Processing to automatically identify documents and extract information from scanned images are fairly amazing and perform highly automated functions if the system is designed with well-known document types.  In other words, the information on the pages such as a invoice number is in a fairly consistent part of the page (i.e. always in the upper-right hand corner of the page).  But when more and more document types are introduced to the capture system, the complexity of the system becomes exponentially more difficult and chances are that the automation accuracy will decrease.


The truth is that these capabilities are not complete magic (yet) and require system administrators to carefully develop capture strategies that assist the capture software in making intelligent decisions about documents.  If you are in the document capture or document scanning business you’ll often hear the phrase similar to, “Oh, I’ll just use my existing multifunction device to scan to a folder and let my capture software process the scanned images from the folder.”  While this approach of document capture is certainly an option that works, this road to document capture is littered with potential potholes, possible dead-ends and a lot of downstream work that should be carefully considered.


The idea of scanning images into a folder and then performing data extraction from these images is certainly not new.  In fact it is probably the most commonly used method to get images into document management systems, however there are certain considerations to take into account when using this capture technique.  Just because it’s simple to configure, cost effective and works, this does not mean that it is necessarily the most effective.  For some of the reasons I will elaborate below the year of 2010 saw a dramatic rise in The ‘No Folder Zone’.


A truly integrated document capture strategy has some of these qualities that scanning to folders may lack:

  • Reduce complexity of the capture system through centralized control
  • Enforce business continuity from the repository, not desktop
  • Eliminate the need for rescanning and ensure optimal image quality

While there are several methods to get an image into a document management system (including scanning to a folder), what is just as, if not more, important is getting the properly associated metadata or index values with that image into your repository for search and retrieval purposes.  Otherwise your document management system is nothing more than a glorified publicly shared folder on the network where retrieval of these images is done by memory or found by file name only.  Scanning to a folder is not necessarily a bad thing based on your organizations particular requirements, however when many people are contributing scanned documents into a system this creates honest mistakes such as lack of consistency, decreased efficiency and potential security or retention risks.

The “Twilight Zone” is defined as “the ambiguous region between 2 categories, states, or conditions (usually containing some features of both)”.  This is a also a good description of The ‘No Folder Zone’.  While scanning to a folder, then importing might give the appearance of an integrated solution, the truth is the region of connectivity (integration) is ambiguous between capture and ECM repository.  A solid document capture system will contain the following certain qualities:

  • Changes in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system should immediately be reflected in your document capture solution
  • Mapping of capture software index fields to ECM index fields is dynamic
  • Affords the system to be modified, changed or enhanced easily as organizational requirements change


My main point in writing this blog post about the ‘No Folder Zone’ is not to bash all that is wrong or point out potential pitfalls with scanning to folders.  In fact this is a great solution if this is truly what a particular organization requires.  However, far too often taking the simple approach of scanning to folders is the easy way to offer document scanning to users and many of the other issues this causes are not carefully considered.  As system administrators become more aware and truly understand some of the incredible advanced in document capture technology then hopefully they can appreciate that a well-designed document capture system can drastically help reduce labor costs, improve quicker access to information and be a strategic business advantage, as well as, improve adherence to compliance or regulatory standards.

The ‘No Folder Zone’

As always I appreciate the time you’ve spent to read this posting about The ‘No Folder Zone’ and how this trend is influencing the Document Capture business.  I welcome comments, feedback and/or constructive criticism.  Please feel free to click ‘The SharePoint effect’ graphic below to read about the second trend witnessed in 2010 that changed the Document Capture landscape forever.

-Kevin


Capturing Opportunity, Technology = Positivity

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Kevin NealI am very fortunate and blessed to be where I am now with my career in the document capture and enterprise content management (ECM) industry. I would not probably have planned it this way but it has turned out to serve me and, more importantly I would hope, those whom I’ve work with well. I have had the honor of being asked to blog a few entries for AIIM’s new ‘document capture’ community and I would like to take this initial post to share a little bit about myself, Kevin Neal.

First, and as full disclosure, I work with Fujitsu as a Product Marketing Manager for our document scanners [Updated 12/5/13: I no longer work for Fujitsu]. That being said, I consider myself a well-rounded technologist based on my business experience rather than a “marketing guy”. You will find my writing and thoughts to be honest and sincere.

I have worked in the document image processing (DIP), errrr ummm, document imaging management (DIM), errrr ummm, I mean ECM industry for over 21 years now. I’ve seen the industry change (more than just industry acronyms) and evolve over these years into something that is now top-of-mind for organizations and even individuals alike instead of being an expensive, niche, hard-to-understand and difficult to deploy technology. I have a dry sense of humor and I can be quite sarcastic so I’m sure that you will sense these Kevin Neal-ism’s in my writing so I apologize in advance. I hope that I can contribute real value to this industry based on my work experience and perspective gathered over these years.

So, twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I started in this industry with “first-hand” experience (literally) observing document scanning technology and working with leading vendors such as ViewStar, Calera, Caere, Xionics, LaserMaster, TDC, Keyfile, Watermark, Cornerstone, Artist Graphics and others that have since been acquired and molded into new current leading ECM vendors. This “first-hand” experience was me working in the shipping and receiving department at Law Cypress Distributing Company so it doesn’t sound as glorious as I spun-it in the first sentence, but it was an introduction to the technology and vendors none-the-less. I was quickly promoted to Inside Sales at the Company where I helped support our sales team. I also worked with the marketing team to create our first print catalog (yes, print catalog – remember Al Gore was still inventing the Internet in those days). In retrospect I look back on that as an extremely valuable project because I became familiar with the different parts of a document capture solution and how they fit together and complement each other. In addition to the warehouse and inside sales positions I held at the Company I also managed the Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) and evaluation departments and this experience enabled me to test and troubleshoot all sorts of imaging equipment which was another invaluable experience. I left Law Cypress in 1993 only to return in 1999 but in a completely different capacity, as their Network Administrator.

During this time period between stints at Law Cypress, I held various sales and marketing positions at Bell Microproducts and International Computer Graphics, both of which have since been acquired. I was very proud of the success at both companies and it gave me great perspective on how overwhelming understanding even the basics of document capture and imaging can be for someone who are unfamiliar with this technology. You see even though both Companies sold IT products, document imaging was such a departure for our people internally as well as our customers that it took a lot of patience to eventually realize this success. This patience and trying to explain very technical things in a easy to understand fashion is what I gained most from this experience and I try to share in a similar matter to this day.

Fast forward to around the 1996 -1999 timeframe. I found myself completely out of the document capture business, yet still involved intimately with technology. Quite honestly I was frustrated with our industry at the time. Why? While the industry was growing and the technology was becoming better the truth is it was too expensive, too complicated to implement, too sophisticated to learn and way too niche. There were no big name IT players helping drive adoption of our technology an most of the technology was cutting edge type products only being embraced by true early adopters http://www.apte…net/. I don’t think the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Adobe and others truly appreciated the value of “enterprise content”. Of course nowadays, each of these vendors has woven their products and services tightly into the ECM landscape through a series of acquisitions or flurry of product development recently which are directly related to document capture and/or managing business content. During these few years out of the document capture industry I worked as a consultant for a small company doing network installations and troubleshooting. Unbeknownst to me at the time this would turn out to be extremely valuable in my current position due to the fact that network-attach peripherals such a network scanners and multifunction devices seem to be all the rage. In conjunction to working as a consultant I also started my own web development company where I learned, mostly the hard way, many technical things not specific to document capture but are closely related.

As I mentioned earlier in this post I returned to Law Cypress in 1999 as their Network Administrator managing both the computer network and telephone system. I managed the network for the corporate location as well as several remote offices. Again, I could not appreciate how valuable this experience was at the time but, in retrospect, isn’t cloud computing somewhat similar to managing infrastructure, applications and communications over a network (internet)? Yes, I think the concept is somewhat similar and fortunately I can fall back on this experience for a basic understanding of concepts although the underlining technology might be different. It’s helped me to have a solid foundation of technical understanding. This experience has also given me great respect for the challenges of managing IT infrastructure. This is one of the reasons that I preach ease-of-use as a priority for vendors and one of the reasons we must strive as an industry to develop products that are highly functional, yet easy to use. IT departments know that they want to, and should, deploy document capture technology for the obvious benefits but most simply do not have the time or resources to add complication to their already difficult jobs.

I didn’t intend for this blog to be an summary of my entire business career but I did want to provide insight and background on myself. I think it’s important that readers of my posts understand I am speaking from experience and I can respect how document capture technology can affect, either positively or negatively, organizations. If an organization is attempting to change their whole way of doing business from paper-based process to electronic process this is not something to be taken lightly. A successful document capture and ECM strategy can drastically help organizations be more efficient, cut costs and improve process. While an unsuccessful implementation could become a burden with terrible consequences.

I hope you enjoy reading my, as well as my fellow bloggers, posts. I am always open to constructive criticism. I’m not always right – believe it or not – and I’m always willing to have a healthy debate about any topics. I look forward to your feedback and comments.

In summary, I hope you can appreciate my perspective and this is why I remain extremely positive in these challenging economic times. Because technology that improves efficiency, cuts costs and helps improve process can only be a good thing (when well understood) and that’s what we hope to deliver at http://www.aiim.org/Community/Blogs.

 

Sincerely,

Kevin