Top Image Systems (TIS) has announced a global reseller agreement with Xerox to give customers end-to-end automation solutions for industry-specific, content-driven processes.  Content processing solutions from TIS will be integrated into Xerox’s workflow automation suite, which helps simplify end-to-end processes for a range of industries including financial services, healthcare and government.

Alex Toh, TIS Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Japan (APACJ), said, “The Xerox agreement further substantiates the partnership TIS has with Xerox and Fuji Xerox over the last decade.

“Fuji Xerox and its various subsidiaries and operating companies around Asia Pacific have been clients as well as partners with TIS APACJ and will continue to go to market together. We envisage that activities with both Xerox and Fuji Xerox will increase substantially given that both entities have now validated eFLOW is their capture platform of choice.”

The solutions will help enterprises improve their day-to-day effectiveness and streamline content-driven tasks, such as customer on-boarding, manual data entry, claims administration and invoice processing.

Xerox recently undertook a survey of 600 IT decision-makers in large North American and Western European organizations, which found that while the move from paper to digital processes is nearly upon us, many survey respondents admit they may not be ready for it. Industries covered were public sector, financial services and corporate enterprise.

The “Digitization at Work” report from Xerox found broad concern over paper-based processes, with cost (42 percent) and security (42 percent) cited as primary issues. Survey respondents predicted an average of only nine percent of key business operation processes will run on paper in the next two years.

But more than half (55 percent) of the respondents admit their organisations’ processes are still largely or entirely paper-based, and about one-third (29 percent) are still communicating with end customers via paper, rather than email or social channels.

This is despite the fact that 41 percent agree moving to digital workflows will cut organizational costs, and 87 percent appear to have the skill sets available to make this happen.

“Organizations foresee a lean and agile digital future, but current business processes are still weighed down by paper,” said Andy Jones, vice president, Workflow Automation, Large Enterprise Operations, Xerox. “The disconnect between an organisation’s vision and the steps required to achieve successful digital transformation has stalled the promise of digitisation.”

When it comes to automating processes, almost three-quarters of respondents said they already have identified areas for automation. More specifically, they cite accounting (38 percent), expense reporting (37 percent), accounts payable (36 percent) and customer care (35 percent) as the most likely functions to become fully automated within the enterprise.

Yet the report identified a number of basics that many enterprises have yet to address to make automation and digital workflows a reality in key business functions. According to the organizations surveyed:

• 40 percent have not yet implemented solutions for the mobile workforce
• 47 percent have not yet added or improved cloud services
• 45 percent have not yet incorporated or improved predictive analysis through big data

In many cases, digitizing or re-engineering paper-based processes before they are automated will lead to better results. Analysing employee print habits, for example, provides an insight into hidden opportunities for digitization where paper use is high. The report also found that 90 percent of respondents said they have good tools to analyse employee print habits, but only half of them (45 percent) are using those tools to their full extent.

The full Xerox report on the study can be downloaded from here: http://xerox.bz/1QQwPg5