Front Office Capture Highlights at Momentum Conference

Yesterday, I presented in one of the Momentum at EMC World sessions in which I talked about the use of capture in a distributed environment. While a large percentage of documents are often processed in a central facility, a fair number of paper document transactions start remotely. This could be an employee at a bank branch office opening up a new customer account, an insurance agent in the field taking care of a claim, or the interaction with partners/advisors where paper is often part of the process. Regardless of the situation, a paper transaction that starts remotely is best handled where it originates rather than having documents mailed in for processing.

EMC Partner Launches New Mobile Apps for EMC ApplicationXtender

EMC World 2011 may have come to an end yesterday, but there was so much news going on that I did not have time write about all of it before the show ended.  One of the cool announcements came from an EMC partner, Business Imaging Systems (BIS), who announced three new mobile apps that connect into EMC ApplicationXtender. BIS is calling it MAX and it is described as “content management unplugged”. The new offerings will connect users from Apple iPhone and Android devices, tablets, and network KIOSK devices, with the content management environment of ApplicationXtender. You can read more about MAX here.

At EMC World, I had the opportunity to get a quick demo of the various products they are launching.

Thoughts on Recent Digital Mailroom Roundtable Event

I recently spoke at a local field event in New York City, the topic – Automate Your Mailroom with Intelligent Enterprise Capture. Overall a great event both from attendance and the questions that were asked.  It was an EMC / Paragon Solutions co-sponsored event where I kicked things off talking about the digital mailroom concept, the capture technologies that are important, and the benefits the Captiva intelligent enterprise capture solutions can deliver.

Paragon also provided great insight into their experiences working with clients on various digital mailroom projects. They talked about the different stages of implementing a digital mailroom – establish requirements, define overall future state, establish priorities, develop a business case, and define a roadmap. Each stage is important and when followed enables companies to achieve their goals and objectives.

The other aspect of what Paragon does for organizations when implementing Captiva and other technologies, is how they assess the maturity of an organization. This helps to evaluate people, process, and technology relative to document processing efficiency and to create a pragmatic roadmap to achieving a greater level of maturity. What comes out of this approach by Paragon is a set of deliverables that detail important things like  future state, process flows for the mailroom,  gap analysis, implementation strategy, and future state technology architecture/blueprint.

Digital Mailroom and  ROI

A big part of this roundtable event was to talk about real world deployments and the savings organizations have been able to achieve with the EMC Captiva intelligent enterprise  capture solutions. I have many examples I can sight, but the ones that Paragon talked about clearly demonstrate the ongoing need for intelligent enterprise capture for the mailroom.

Here’s one great example:

Top five life and annuity insurance company:

• Receives 1,500 new account application packets per week and require classification of 180 different work types that integrate with their AWD platform. Prior to implementing Captiva, 100% of the data entry was manual, and average new account processing time was three days.
• The solution – implement Captiva to create a digital mailroom where documents are automatically classified and data extracted, and integrated with AWD and Nba using ACORD standard messaging formats.
• The results – reduced average account opening time from three days to one day, and reduced processing cost by 35%.

Why Now?

As a main entry point into a business, the mailroom is typically a complex environment. Manually managing the flow of paper is labor-intensive, and however efficient teams are, delays in processing remain, ultimately affecting the service businesses are able to deliver. This environment is likely not going to change anytime soon so long as businesses continue to accept and process paper that comes from the outside. Many business processes like new account opening, claims, loans, and others, still have rely heavily on paper. So even if a process starts electronically with a phone call or an online application, a bi-product of this initiation is paper documents that contain required signatures, additional data, and other supporting documents.

What EMC Captiva can do for businesses is “intelligently” capture, classify, and deliver information to the right people and into the right systems. By eliminating manual document sorting and data entry, Captiva helps organizations minimize the risk of error, reduce costs, and boost productivity. Thanks to enterprise capture’s automation, businesses can take control of their mailroom, whether documents arrive by mail, fax, or any electronic format.

To learn more on this topic, check out the Captiva Ideal Office site. I’m looking forward to doing this event again in other regions given it is definitely a topic people want to discuss.

evaluate people, process, and technology relative to document processing efficiency to create a pragmatic Roadmap to achieving a greater level of maturity