Image & Data manager surveyed its readers across Australia and New Zealand to find out the state of enterprise capture

The benefits of digitisation and process automation are so well documented, it begs the question why we still debate the topic in 2011? If the ROI is so obvious why are there still so many manual processes and paper-based workflows in government and business?

The answers are many, and can trace their roots in simple economics, legal and regulatory obstacles, and the basic difficulty in turning a big ship around, that is managing change.

Over a third of those surveyed have introduced capture capabilities, or are about to. Another third are back-scanning physical documents held in archives, either routinely or when called up from archive. The split between centralised vs. distributed capture, i.e. a mailroom or local office scanning or MFPs, was about 50/50 either way.

One major Australian federal government department with more than 5500 staff is currently operating a distributed capture environment, but looking into a centralised enterprise solution. Capture is presently being applied to incoming mail, plans and drawings, accounts payable (invoices), contracts and claims.

Reduced storage costs and automated workflow are seen as the main advantages of a capture solution, in addition to satisfying regulatory compliance.

A major Australian media organisation with over 250 staff is taking a midway approach by scanning physical documents when they are called up from the paper archive.

Better searchability and findability are the drivers here. Asked to define the main benefits of enterprise capture, a clear majority indicated the fact that it makes it easier to find documents. Reducing storage costs and delivering automated workflow were both popular. There were surprisingly few who saw the potential for reduced staff count as a big potential win.

Establishing the business case for capture case can be tough. The major obstacle to implementing a capture solution was upfront cost, closely followed by the associated challenge of getting to the head of the queue of your organisation’s IT initiatives.

Tony Quinn, IT Manager at biscuit maker Unibic, is evaluating a makeover of many of the company’s business processes, and would like to see a move to paperless operation for invoice processing and other business processes such as picking lists, which must be printed out to instruct the warehouse on what items are needed to fulfil a sales order.

Unibic, a Victorian company, has produced speciality biscuits, pastries and cakes for over 50 years. The Unibic range includes an RSL-licensed ANZAC biscuit line, Weight Watchers branded baked goods, a variety of shortbreads and European-style biscuits, and the Erica’s Kitchen entertaining range.

In July 2010, Victorian Premier John Brumby cut the ribbon on Unibic’s new $44 million biscuit and cake facility in Broadmeadows, which will produce Unibic’s whole range. As well as established markets in Australia and New Zealand, Unibic is growing into markets in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and India.

The move to EDI with its main customers, Coles and Woolworths, has cut down the paper trail extensively, but there are still thousands of paper invoices arriving each month from a broad range of suppliers that must be manually keyed into Unibic’s Lawson M3 ERP platform.

“The basic ingredients for a baker are sugar, flour and eggs, and most of our transactions with these type of suppliers come in on paper,” said Quinn.

“The ROI for AP automation is pretty clear, and I expect the investment would pay for itself in three years, but for a small Australian manufacturer like us, there is an ongoing  focus on manufacturing, and continued investment in platforms and equipment to keep us competitive.

“We are also looking  to implement RFID in the warehouse, but as the products we create, biscuits and cakes and pavlovas, etc., are not really high value products in individual terms, it’s hard to justify the cost of the RFID tags. Although along with process flow and document management it promises to give us more control of our business processes.”

At the Department of Human Services, formerly Centrelink, 60% of customer related documents are scanned by external BPO Salmat as they arrive in the organisation and placed into an Filenet ERMS system.

Some administrative records are also scanned into Filenet. Physical documents are being scanned to assist search and findability and because of an identified need to improve knowledge sharing.

The Department of Human Services is also looking to paperless operation to follow the federal  government push to merge digital records and information management.

One large Queensland state government department has centralised digitisation and capture through its mail processing area for incoming items, while also having distributed digitisation and capture for outgoing items.

"In addition we have outsourced the production of many of our standard documents and this organisation is responsible for the digitisation of those documents," said the organisation’s records manager.

"We have limited OCR/ICR capability - this relies on barcode recognition for capture. we do not have full text search capability of digitised records (due to limited eDRMS functionality). Our eDRMS is tightly integrated with our core business systems.

"Integration between eDRMS and core business systems has also resulted in improved client service improvements as call centre operators can quickly access client information."

The department is expecting further benefits in reduced storage costs when the State Archivist approves the destruction of paper originals, as well as looking forward to automated workflow when new case management and workflow applications are implemented.

Kofax has provided Australian financial giant Suncorp with an enterprise capture solution worth over $A1.5 million.

The Suncorp group of companies offer a range of financial products and services in banking, general insurance, life insurance, superannuation and investment products across Australia and New Zealand. The Suncorp Group has around 16,000 employees and boasts over nine million customers.

In 2010 Suncorp implemented IBM’s FileNet platform for enterprise content management, and has now introduced Kofax capture to digitise loans processing. Other potential applications of document capture have been identified in human resources and invoice processing.

Suncorp is also utilising IBM Business Process Manager software. The application went live in July 2011 to capture information from loan applications and deliver it to a FileNet-based workflow.

The digital transition will remove the need for as many as 5000 paper files to be handled by the loan processing staff at any one time.

“Whenever incoming documents drive business processes and transactions, companies can benefit from implementing a capture solution. Kofax software offers a unified enterprise capture platform that is highly reliable, secure and scalable,” said Martyn Christian, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Kofax.

“Reduced operating costs, increased productivity, accelerated business processes, better data quality and improved regulatory compliance efforts easily combine to provide a compelling, short term return on investment.”