Digital Transformation is the ideology of the year for businesses reliant on document-intensive work. Countless organisations of all sizes and industries have shifted their processes to find solutions that provide fast, reliable, and secure ways to get data into their systems. Cloud capture has become a driving force for implementing digital strategies this year with good reason. Digitising data right at the point of entry into the document lifecycle makes perfect sense before sending it off to recipients and workflows.

As many organisations move to paperless processes, considering how capture technology ties into a document management system (DMS) is a critical first step. To help the rest of the business go digital, capture solutions help you handle the never-ending challenges associated with paper and document transmission more easily. Here are the basics to any powerful capture solution:

1. More Ways to Get Documents In
When it comes to implementing new technology and standardising processes, user adoption is critical, and it is wholly based on ease of use and flexibility. Not every business has the same procedures; everyone has different staff and structure. One organisation may have a scanning staff, others may empower employees with tools to do it themselves, and some may even have a hybrid of both methods.

When it comes down to it, if you can give employees resources to submit documents from MFPs, desktop scanners, mobile devices, fax, email, or even APIs, you can enable any use case and solve problems that save everyone time.

2. Extracts and Organises Data – Automatically
Basic capture solutions allow images and documents to be transformed mid-transit on the way to the final destination and advanced capture solutions take these capabilities to another level.

With sophisticated functionality like document classification with data extraction, you can effortlessly pull information off what were once flat images. When you enable capture with data extraction and indexing capabilities, you can send these documents downstream with related information that can dictate workflows and final destinations, even down to the folder level inside line-of-business systems. Talk about taking the busy work out of your day!

3. Easily Integrates with Other Systems
Capture technology is most useful when it can integrate seamlessly with existing systems like cloud fax, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) for healthcare, Student Information Systems (SIS) for education, or Document Management Systems (DMS) such as NetDocuments.

The ability to dovetail with existing software and systems enables busy workers to quickly capture an image or document and route it directly into the hands of the right recipient or repository, with a simple click of a button. Moreso, with systems like NetDocuments, you can set up dynamic workflows that will automatically submit to different folders inside NetDocuments immediately upon scan. The bottom line? The path to the DMS is much faster, and your staff will appreciate the superior user experience.

4. Enhances Security and Compliance
In our data-driven business climate, ensuring the security of data captured is of paramount importance. This is why premier capture solutions must take into account industry data privacy and security standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and beyond.

A few other features that bolster data security for captured content are secure faxing for communication of sensitive information, data loss prevention, encryption at rest, and “delete upon send” capabilities that ensure captured images don’t remain locally on devices on which they were captured.

5. Enables Work from Anywhere
These days, staff are working from everywhere – office headquarters, the home office, while traveling on the job, who can keep track? Capture technology that’s accessible from any desktop – or even better, any mobile device – allows content to be quickly and securely captured, organised, and routed to workflows, appropriate staff, or archival as needed. It removes the wait to retrieve from off-site storage, couriers, snail mail, or access to scanning devices since work can get done from any network-enabled device. In this brave new remote working reality, accessibility is a big win to ensure business continuity.

Bringing it Home
In truth, paper will likely never go away entirely– at least not in our lifetimes. But cloud capture is taking Digital Transformation from concept into practice for organisations worldwide by providing fast, seamless, and secure processes to replace the paper chase.

Using smart capture technologies, staff can capture document images from almost any device, automatically pull data they need, and make decisions based on that data to send it downstream to other team members or applications. With cloud capture, organisations solve process challenges and set the wheels in motion toward a nearly paperless future.

Learn More
Upland Intelligent Capture and Upland AccuRoute offer scalable capabilities to NetDocuments users to better manage cloud-based capture and enterprise fax solutions, with the result of making smart Digital Transformation strategies more realistic to put into practice farther down the line. Enquire at sales@filebound.com.au

Karen Cummings is EVP and General Manager for the Upland Document Workflow suite of products.