Want to improve key business processes? Think: "distributed capture"
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/7/2007 9:11:00 AM
AIIM—The Enterprise Content Management Association, has issued a new Industry Watch study that finds a majority of organizations have either begun—or are in the throes of—distributed-scanning and capture-systems projects. Titled Distributed Capture: Moving Capture Closer to Document Creation, and sponsored by Xerox Global Services, the study confirms deployment of distributed capture is critical to improving key business processes.
"Capture is sometimes looked upon as a mature technology, but I prefer to think of it as a mainstream technology with enormous mainstream opportunities," states AIIM President John Mancini. "Organizations have only just begun to extract paper from their business processes. Pushing capture closer to the point of document creation—which is the whole point of distributed capture—represents the next great process improvement opportunity for organizations."
Key findings:
· When asked to identify the processes in which distributed capture is used, Finance and Administration departments were clear front-runners with 59 percent of responses.
· For organizations involved with distributed capture, it is clearly and predominately an enterprisewide initiative, with 60 percent of end users identifying multifunction devices deployed at the enterprise level as either important or very important to their distributed-capture programs.
One clear trend that emerged from the survey was the identification of transaction-intensive processes as popular targets for distributed capture, such as invoice processing, expense reporting, personnel actions, new hire processing, order processing. and new account setup.
Processes that lend themselves more to an ad hoc and customized processes, such as custom quote request and customer care are more likely to be less fully impacted by simple capture and perhaps more readily lend themselves to benefit from online collaboration and more knowledge-oriented technologies.
Says Carl Frappaolo, AIIM VP, market intelligence, "It is interesting to see that an overwhelming majority of respondents improved efficiency and process automation as a top benefit derived from distributed capture. Potential investors in distributed capture should heed this lesson. There are great benefits to be realized from such an investment that go far beyond the elimination of paper and associated shipping, and go to the core of business efficiency and productivity. In fact, virtually tied for the third most popular answer, along with reduced shipping and copying/paper costs, was increased information security, which also plays to a far more strategic positioning of benefits."
Distributed capture lends itself almost innately to an enterprisewide application and can be fundamental to boosting process efficiency, especially within those business and processes that have yet to completely migrate to an e-based solution.
About the Survey
This Industry Watch survey on business process management was conducted during July 2007, and was administered through an online survey instrument, zoomerang.com. A total of 452 end users participated in the survey.
Survey respondents represented organizations of all sizes. Half of the survey population was comprised of large organizations ( > 1000 employees). The remaining 50 percent was virtually evenly split between medium (101 - 1,000 employees) and small organizations (1 - 100 employees.)
The survey population was also spread across multiple vertical industries. The largest sample came from state and local government (17%), followed by banking and finance (14%). This is perhaps reflective of the fact that these industries were early adaptors of capture technologies. A significant percentage of the survey participants also represented end users from such industries as: 1) insurance; 2) utilities, oil and gas; 3) federal government; 4) service bureaus and 5) manufacturing.
The survey population, and thus survey findings, is weighted towards a U.S.-based perspective. 63% of the survey population resides in the U.S., with 7% from Canada, 6% from the U.K. and 4% from Australia.
Individual survey participants also represented variety of professional roles within their organizations. Nearly 20% of the participants represent the "business" side. 45% are those with a great deal of experience with documents and records, and 23% represent IT. This mix of representation—business, document and records, and IT—is typical of the profile of most AIIM activities.
