Making innovation happen with intelligent capture

Challenges in digitisation and the need for intelligent capture

The workplace today is demanding a different set of skills and capabilities. Now more than ever, organisations need to embrace digital disruption as a springboard for competitive advantage and adopt new ways of working that invigorate organisational performance.

Despite the driving need to digitise, the fact is that many organisations continue to struggle with manual processes and paper-bound workflow in key areas of business processes. According to our 2021 State of the Industry Report, AIIM members tell us that digitising,automating, and integrating processes is a top information management challenge. The needed capabilities include the ability to leverage remote work as an advantage, remove the burden of paper, and drive business growth despite these challenging times.

Organisations need to embrace disruption as a springboard for competitive advantage and adopt new ways of working that invigorate organisational performance.

Members tell us that many activities and business processes have yet to be digitally transformed. “Our workflow is very paper-driven and our processes are manual,” said one survey respondent. “We still struggle with paper and incomplete or confusing processes,” said another. Some members express frustration about the lack of progress. “Our Information Management team is about four years old and we are still working with basic scanning and human indexing.” And “the company has relied on paper far too much, partly because people look at content as analogous to paper.” Other members question if digitisation will ever become a reality. “We are in the process of automating, but many, many company records are stored in boxes and file cabinets.”

Finding a path forward

Intelligent capture provides a path forward. The key is to regard the effort with more than a ‘scan and store’ approach. Sure, you can scan documents to create an image as a first step to eliminate paper; but this falls short of the full potential. Wider and more impactful opportunities exist for organisations to bridge the gap between paper and digital media, especially in traditionally paper-intensive fields such as financial services, healthcare, or government.

Intelligent capture automates the process of identifying and extracting critical information from incoming paper and electronic documents without extensive guidance from a user. Automation replaces manual input and processing, and the captured content is then stored in an organised manner complete with metadata and classification.

In addition to eliminating paper and reclaiming storage space, significant process improvements and savings can be attained with intelligent capture. During the digitisation process, metadata is extracted, making it easy and efficient to search and find critical information. Data extraction strategies pull detailed data from documents and recognition technologies allow the system to read handwriting, map fields, and leverage advanced data codes and glyphs. Scanned images and the captured data are passed to content management systems while captured line item information is passed to any number of ERP or business application systems.

The benefits of intelligent capture begin with the ability to eliminate paper and gain more efficient document retrieval, but you get the added dimension of feeding vital information into a variety of enterprise content management systems and applications. This can be a formidable ingredient. With thoughtful integration, intelligent capture enables organisations to overcome several challenges caused by manual data entry, providing reduced overhead and increased efficiency. More than that, intelligent capture frees up human resources formerly used for manual data input and processing to perform other important business tasks.