Archive for the ‘Capture Blog - Macciola’ Category

By Anthony Macciola at Mon, 01/03/2011 – 14:29
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

It’s not uncommon for organizations to want to lower their overall total cost of ownership for IT infrastructure. Capture owners are no different. The use of Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) technology has delivered significant cost savings in relation to minimizing and/or eliminating human touch and involvement throughout the capture process. These cost savings are usually realized during the runtime execution of the capture system.

The other area that can be leveraged relative to lowering the overall total cost of ownership of a capture system is in the setup, configuration and ongoing management of the system.

Historically, capture systems are set up and configured as standalone, independent systems. This often will result in the creation of redundant batch, document and field taxonomies and business rules that typically exist within existing IT infrastructure and systems.

If you take a step back look at the big picture, why couldn’t the capture system leverage and exploit these existing taxonomies and rules whenever possible, or use ground truth data, taxonomies and rules whenever available? It could and should.

If you’re wondering what capture systems are likely to look like in the future, they’ll likely be extensions or integrated components of existing IT infrastructure or line of business (LOB) applications and will be managed and executed under the purview of a larger LOB application versus being a standalone entity.

Capture’s roots are based in archival, namely capturing paper documents (usually after a business process has executed) for the purpose of archiving the paper documents in a repository of some sort. As capture transitions beyond scan-to-archive and becomes instrumental in process automation, the historic independent capture system mentality will be forced to evolve into a more transaction centric model that is controlled and integrated within an organization’s application framework. In other words, capture will evolve to become an integrated component of larger LOB applications.

This is a subtle but material evolution for the capture market and will allow capture to expand to a wider range of applications and process automation use cases.

When you combine this evolution with some of the other innovations and trends we’ve talked about over the past couple of months, it should become evident that capture is going through a renaissance and is poised for a new era of growth and expansion.

By Anthony Macciola at Fri, 10/15/2010 – 17:24
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

So what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about business process automation (BPA)? I’ll bet that it’s not a multi function peripheral (MFP)! Why do you think that is?  When you think about it, many business processes are document driven and are initiated in the field as an ad-hoc transaction. Historically, people have used fax as a way to initiate a transaction, but we all know the image quality limitations that come along with fax.

However, there is another, somewhat obvious element to consider.   Many of today’s organizations have network attached MFPs deployed in the field, so why not allow a knowledge worker to initiate a business processes by capturing the document that drives the process? In other terms, why not leverage your fleet of enterprise MFPs to be the front office interface for your field based knowledge workers and your back office BPA infrastructure. It’s the perfect marriage and an optimal and effective use of your overall IT infrastructure (doing more with less, so to speak).

That’s why any enterprise capture platform must have an MFP component that provides the ability to centrally discover, manage and monitor a distributed fleet of MFPs.

However, there is one slight catch.  Most MFPs don’t produce the same quality of image output that users have come to expect from production scanners. Or, at a minimum, most MFPs lack the ability to capture mixed document sets and product reliable and predictable image quality. For that reason, many enterprise customers will typically use production scanners rather than leverage their existing MFP fleet.

Traditionally, the image processing/perfection provided in most (if not all) MFPs is geared toward providing aesthetically pleasing print output as opposed to process-ready output (process-ready being a document that is conducive to downstream document classification and metadata extraction, both of which are key precursors to any business process automation framework). When you look at the most common use of MFPs in the capture world, it’s traditionally been based around collaboration. This includes scan to fax and scan to email, where the knowledge worker receiving the document is likely to print it as well. In this case, everything works fine. However, things start to get a bit sketchy when one uses the MFP for archiving the content or initiating a business process.

This discussion sounds very similar to the mobile phone capture subject we discussed earlier.   In concept, the potential problems share some similarities.  For example, how does one simply and reliably produce process-ready documents?  This is an issue that Kofax VirtualReScan (VRS) has solved in the production scanner market. Turns out the same problem needs to be addressed in the MFP market (as stated by a couple of leading industry analysts). By solving this issue, an MFP could be a viable alternative to a production scanner, especially in a distributed, transaction oriented business process automation environment.

As I mentioned when we discussed mobile devices, the MFP platforms haven’t evolved to the point where we can get access to raw CCD output at the level we need and currently get from production scanners, but we’re seeing significant forward progress and interest as various MFP providers realize the upside and opportunity to differentiate themselves and effectively compete in the BPA market. It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw new generations of MFPs brought to market that had VRS embedded and were able to produce process-ready documents straight out of the device itself.

Such an evolution would be a win-win all around as MFP vendors would now be able to position their devices as distributed business process kiosks (much higher value than a shared output device) and customers would be able to consolidate their overall IT infrastructure, saving money while increasing overall efficiency.

This is definitely something to watch and plan for as the business process automation and management markets become more pervasive and dominate the overall buying behaviors of global organizations.

As a leader in the document capture market, we’re committed to making this happen and evolving the world of document capture to the next level.

By Anthony Macciola at Fri, 09/10/2010 – 13:56
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

How do you know what kinds of documents you’re capturing? How do you figure out what types of documents are entering your organization? These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked in today’s document-driven organizations in order to maximize productivity, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Most people today are still using the “old school” method of using document separator sheets with patch codes and/or barcodes on them. Although very effective, this often comes at a cost; materials (paper and ink) and labor relative to manually reviewing each physical piece of paper and determining the appropriate place to insert the preprinted separator sheet.

For those of you still using this method, it’s time to embrace the 21st century and think about how you can best drive cost out of your capture operation by eliminating the need for separator sheets.

The compelling replacement for separator sheets is document classification. There are two distinct technologies used for classifying documents.

• Image-based classification:Looks at the geometry of the image, based on image layout and patterns; can be trained by showing the classifier samples and labeling them appropriately.
• Text-based classification:Looks at the content of the document and is based on text patterns; can be trained by showing the classifier samples and labeling them appropriately.

Classification is also a critical component of document separation. Document separation technology leverages classification techniques to determine what it’s looking at and then applies additional logic to ascertain document boundaries and logical groupings. Together, classification and document separation are a cost-effective alternative to document separator sheets.

In addition, document classification can have a significant impact on other aspects of your overall capture operation.

• Mailroom Operations: classification can be used as a tool to discern what is being captured and where it should be distributed.
• Capture for archival purposes: classification can be used to determine the appropriate folder for the captured content.
• Capture for the purpose of driving a business process: classification can be used to ascertain what has been captured and determine the appropriate workflow to initiate.

Effective classification offerings require little to no prior setup. If you’re using a solution that requires scripting or dictionary (keyword) creation and/or maintenance, you should re-think what you’re doing. Competitive classification offerings require nothing more than showing the system a variety of samples (tens of samples vs. hundreds or thousands) and labeling them. From there, the system can and should do the rest.

If you’re managing a capture operation you should be focused on how you can minimize the amount of human interaction/intervention required to maintain operations, be it scan preparation, scanning, quality control, indexing or otherwise. Classification is one of many tools that you can utilize to increase the overall efficiency of your day-to-day operations.

By Anthony Macciola at Thu, 08/26/2010 – 12:52
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

Capture is expanding to embrace all forms of document capture. This is primarily being driven by customers wanting to be able to capture documents in whatever form they come into their organization as it relates to initiating and driving specific business processes.

However, the first time I meet a customer, it’s not that uncommon for them to let me know (almost as a warning) that they want to go fully electronic. I usually end up inferring that they’re not quite sure why they took the meeting with us, since we’re “the scanning guys”!

As you peel back the onion, the heart of these statements is quite interesting. It all started in the late 1990s with the introduction of the Internet. When it started, we watched as organizations began to create portals that were focused on creating interaction with their customers, vendors, partners and employees. At the same time, they began making big investments in enterprise infrastructure focused around routing, monitoring, and processing content. In hindsight, we’ve watched as many organizations have experienced a change in their DNA. They’ve transitioned from a batch -oriented, central processing mindset, to a highly distributed, real-time, transactional mindset.

So why is that important or relevant? As long as a document remains in paper form it’s kind of a black hole. Organizations have to have different policies and procedures to track paper documents, to ensure their security and to prevent loss. However, they lack an awareness of the content contained within the document. It’s a problem most customers want to make go away. To restate their original desire, they want to truncate paper as quickly as possible. If they could, they’d go to the source where the paper was created and capture the document at its electronic source.

As a result, we find customers looking for help as they look to develop a strategy for truncating paper. Fortunately, our capture platform has evolved and can enable paper truncation and can abstract your organization from the various ways you will no doubt need to capture documents as they come into your organization.

Capture isn’t just about scanning anymore. It’s about capturing documents at large, as they come into your central facilities or as they enter your enterprise out in the field. Capture is about allowing you to set up an enterprise capture framework that can federate your various capture inputs while providing you with a central management framework to deploy, configure, and monitor your document capture on-ramp and the integration of the content you’re on-boarding into your enterprise infrastructure.

Next time, we’ll talk a little bit about mobile capture and the impact it’s likely to have on your business over the next 12-18 months.

By Anthony Macciola at Fri, 08/13/2010 – 13:08
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

Whatever happened to the paperless office? For many years now, the term “paperless office” has been touted as the future of a typical business environment (i.e., “someday there will be no paper…”). Well, it seems that “someday” has come and gone.

As it turns out, there has been a lot of subtle activity going on in the capture world over the past couple of years that has had the net effect of inching us along the way to the ultimate paperless office. Before we go into some of those specific areas, I thought it would be good to address the paperless office urban myth once and for all.

It’s never going to fully be realized, at least not in my lifetime. As you architect your enterprise capture strategy, you need to keep one underlying premise in mind: It’s a hybrid world and your business environment is a hybrid environment. A “one size fits all” mentality is likely to get you into serious trouble, and quickly.

Let me explain what I mean when I reference a hybrid environment. If you were to do an audit of a given business process, you’d likely find that (in general) content pertaining to the execution of the business process comes into your organization in a variety of different ways.

Let’s use a document-centric process that most people should be familiar with; accounts payable and, specifically, invoices. It’s not uncommon any given enterprise to have accounts payable-related transaction content coming into their enterprise in a variety of different forms. Let’s use a live example. One of our customers processes over 20 thousand invoices a month. The top five percent of those invoices come in electronically (i.e., as EDI or XML), 30 percent come in via fax and another 35 percent via email as PDF, Excel, or Word attachments. The remaining 30 percent may arrive via “snail mail” into the mailroom.

The customer had multiple solutions deployed to handle each sort of inbound medium. In a perfect world, they’d have all their customers move to one common electronic model but they know the effort required to shift their supplier base from their existing way of doing business would be cost-prohibitive (they may have tried this route through multiple attempts in the past).

Having learned their lesson, they decided the most cost-effective way to address their problem was to implement a single cost-effective capture strategy and/or that could accommodate the myriad of ways content comes into their organization. Once implemented, they really don’t care at what pace the paper vs. electronic shift occurs. They can establish a single framework for abstracting the on boarding of business content; they can normalize it; and they can understand what it is and can extract the appropriate metadata before sending the content on to their enterprise infrastructure.

In my next entry, we’ll talk about the growing desire to truncate paper as quickly in the process as possible and the benefits you can derive from moving capture from the end of a business process to the beginning. Stay tuned…

By Anthony Macciola at Mon, 08/09/2010 – 11:47
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Document Capture?

• Trained document preparation operators sorting documents into similar document types, removing paper clips, unfolding corners and inserting document separator sheets?
• Skilled scanner operators scanning boxes of paper documents on big expensive scanners in a central capture facility?
• Quality control operators and specialized document index operators reviewing and processing high volumes of documents prior to having the documents stored in a central enterprise content management system?

If these are the sort of things that come to mind, your stereotype or perspective of document capture is similar to the majority of the people out there. The majority of the customers I visit are primarily using capture for the purposes of back office, production batch capture. Traditionally, the  majority of the capture opportunities I get involved with are initially thinking about employing capture to archive paper documents.

While document archiving (typically called “scan to archive”) is important, it doesn’t usually have as significant return on investment as people would like. Its primary driver for purchase is based around retention, either from the perspective of shared access or regulatory adherence.

In today’s economic environment, we find customers making purchase decisions based on these key drivers:

1) Cost reduction or cost containment

2) Gains in operational efficiency

3) Gains in customer satisfaction and retention

4) Gains in internal process situational awareness,

5) And last but not least, risk mitigation from a regulatory standpoint.

When augmenting these purchase drivers, we see an overall push to minimize – or even eliminate — paper as quickly as possible. We’ll be diving in to the motivation factors for truncating paper in future blogs…but for now, know that most of, if not all organizations that we interact with are:

1) Attempting to reach out to the furthest reaches of their enterprise and truncate paper as quickly and as remotely as possible

2) Moving to a self service paradigm relative to validating the integrity of the metadata (e.g., index data) associated with the inbound content.

The result of these dynamics has created a new and compelling relationship between workflow automation systems and intelligent capture solutions. Intelligent capture being the on-ramp for on-boarding business critical content into your workflow infrastructure and processes.

I’ll dedicate some future blogs to diving into the evolution and transition that is occurring within the capture industry and the change in perspective that customers are going through relative to the use of and benefits associated with intelligent capture.

Capture is moving (in the enterprise space) from being an after the fact, centralized and batch oriented (document archiving) process to being the tip of the spear, in a highly decentralized, transaction-oriented environment that is initiating and feeding main stream business processes.

It’s an exciting and compelling phase of the industry’s evolution and a great time for customers to realize real, hard dollar savings to their bottom line.

By Anthony Macciola (Chief Technology Officer for Kofax) at Mon, 08/02/2010 – 00:00
Reposted from the AIIM Capture Community Blog

Well it’s official…I guess you’re going to be hearing more from me over the coming months. I’ve been asked by AIIM to be a regular contributor to their blog forum. My name is Anthony Macciola and I’m currently the Chief Technology Officer for Kofax. I started with Kofax back in 1990 and during my tenure, I’ve had the good fortune to hold several key roles within the organization, including head of professional services, senior director of product management, VP of corporate marketing and EVP of engineering. As part of my role as CTO, I manage our advanced research team.