As challenges always provide chances, the future looks good for the insurance industry as a whole. Companies that understand the new market dynamics and take a holistic approach to cost management, operational efficiency, customer value and risk management will come out as clear winners, driving income, profit and business growth. Globalization and today’s technologies are working in favor of those organizations.

Jon Casher

The finance executive's classic dilemma is choosing between seemingly opposing goals: reduce costs or strengthen internal controls. In today's highly-charged environment, both goals are important but strengthening the control environment has typically required sacrificing efficiency and reducing costs has frequently resulted in weakening controls. This white paper explores how technology such as business process automation and imaging software tightly integrated with ERP systems, can optimize financial processes to achieve both goals while improving service levels, reducing errors, preventing fraud, and maximizing the use of cash.

Jon Casher

With the ongoing financial, credit, and economic crises, corporations continue to be under relentless pressure to reduce Finance operating costs and maximize cash flow while also improving service levels and strengthening internal controls. For many, these seemingly opposing demands have been the major catalyst behind the transformation of Finance operations from decentralized divisional staffing models with disparate processes and systems to a global model. In this new order, core financial operations such as Accounts Payable (AP) are centralized in one or more shared service center (SSC) locations with a single set of streamlined processes and a single technology solution to serve a region or even an entire corporation.

The Accounts Payable (AP) function has many key partners including business units, purchasing, vendors, employees, accounting, auditors, the CFO, and Controller. Satisfying the demands of all these stakeholders can be a daunting task. The constant inquiries, disputes, requests for information and correction of errors can grind AP productivity to a halt. But what if these stakeholders could perform AP-related tasks on their own? This is the concept of self-service. Self-service can be a powerful tool that reduces costs and improves service levels through shorter cycle times without compromising internal controls. At the same time, self-service minimizes errors by virtually eliminating the re-entry of invoice data, the most common source of data and payment errors.

Electronic-invoicing (also known as e-invoicing, EIPP or electronic invoice presentment and payment) has captured the interest of prospective buyers at companies and institutions around the world because of its well documented reputation of achieving the lowest cost Accounts Payable (AP) transaction processing. There are many defi nitions and capabilities of e-invoicing, including the creation and receipt of an electronic invoice; the transformation of a paper invoice into an electronic invoice; the automated entry and validation of its data by a fi nancial accounting (ERP) system; workfl ows to resolve purchase order discrepancies, manage non-purchase order invoices, payment approval and electronic payments.

By Jonathan Casher, Senior Consultant, IOMA Advisory Services
This white paper highlights the various levels of automation, or stages of maturity, for invoice processing. Most organizations are at the lowest level and as a result experience high processing costs and long cycle times. Move your AP organization to the next level by understanding the barriers to invoice automation and learning how to overcome them.

Health care organizations and governments around the globe are facing an unprecedented need to improve health care quality and cut costs at the same time. Historically, the health care industry has been viewed as and acted very “local”, based on economic, cultural and regulatory standards. But today, even with regional differences, the challenges of health care organizations are increasingly similar, and common themes and threats are becoming more and more obvious: cost, quality and transparency.

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is evolving from a low-cost labor option to a flexible model for transforming industry-specific processes with targeted and increasingly automated solutions.

For many companies, document imaging technology offers the best – and perhaps final – hope of controlling the ever-rising tide of paper documents that threatens to engulf them. As a result scanners, a key component of any document imaging system, are appearing with greater frequency in today’s modern office. Often they are found sitting side-by-side with printers, a longstanding fixture in just about every office, modern or not.

- Also available in UK English (PDF file, 107.5K)
As they wait for an easier way to streamline the mountains of paper documents an organization generates, many businesses have continued to rely on outdated practices. In response to the broader market’s need for a practical capture solution, Kofax has drawn on its two decades of experience to introduce Kofax Express. Combining many of the benefits of legacy document capture solutions, Kofax Express is simple to install, easy to learn and integrates seamlessly with existing applications. This white paper discusses the features and benefits of Kofax Express and the ROI that can be achieved by implementing a Kofax Express solution as part of a streamlined capture environment.

- Also available in UK English (PDF file, 373K)
Less than a decade ago, the biggest concern of large financial institutions was whether their systems would be prepared for a changing date. The banks were more than ready for the year 2000. Little did anyone suspect the turbulence that lay ahead— most of it paper based.

- Also available in UK English (PDF file, 955K)
Business transactions can be thought of as ‘conversations,’ where information is exchanged as documents, email messages, instant messages, and fax transmissions. Effectively communicating with your customers, partners, and suppliers through any combination of these can be a significant challenge. Therefore, it should be no surprise that companies around the globe struggle to solve this problem without increasing their labor costs. This white paper proposes a 5-step approach to automate an accounts payable operation, describing the typical costs of processing invoices manually and the saving that can be achieved with each of the incremental steps.

Many organizations must contend with multiple offices, distributed work forces, and partners and customers in a wide variety of locations. These organizations can reduce costs, enhance security and improve productivity by capturing information into their business processes directly from these remote locations. This white paper explains the specific advantages of implementing remote or distributed capture with the Ascent Capture Internet Server.

- Also available in UK English (PDF file, 82.5K)
In today's global economy, information exchange is vital. Competitive advantage goes to the companies that can share information and collaborate quickly and accurately in the most cost-effective manner. Combine this with government requirements around data accuracy, security, and auditing, and your company's very survival is at stake. Accurate, timely, and efficient data capture has quickly moved into virtually every corporation's list of top business concerns. This white paper discusses the benefits of distributed capture to an organization and how Kofax can help attain those benefits.

- Also available in UK English (PDF file, 86.5K)
Document automation technologies often fall victim to their own success. The original layout of a typewriter keyboard, which is still used in virtually all keyboards today, was expressly designed to compensate for the shortcomings of the mechanics of the day. Similar issues continue to surface as the speed of automation causes problems up- or down-stream from a workflow. This white paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of methods to automatically identify the end of one document and the beginning of the next in a stack of pages, as they are scanned and automatically classifying the content of the documents.

Imagine your business without boundaries; paper and electronic forms merge; you can capture information in any form, from any place; you can exchange information more efficiently to drive business processes, ensure traceability of information, and eliminate points of failure as information is managed throughout its life cycle. The Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange product suite keeps information, and your business, moving.

Enhanced Bar Code

Implementing bar code technology is proven to be an efficient, lower cost solution for the automatic indexing of documents, automatic scanner control, batch separation, job control, and the overall quality assurance of images. With the release of the Enhanced Bar Code engine, Kofax is proud to continue enabling this valuable tool.

Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations

Updated for Kofax Capture 8
This white paper covers typical concerns of an IT department regarding software implementation details and how Kofax Capture addresses those concerns.

The Challenges of Color in Production Scanning Operations

Also available in German (PDF file, 212K) and Spanish (PDF file, 237K)
VRS (VirtualReScan) Professional offers new exciting possibilities to effectively embrace the color capabilities of todays document scanners into your current and future business processes. This white paper covers the key business problems, key benefits and consideration in order to successfully approach color empowered document and data capture in production scanning operations.

Assessment of Kofax VirtualReScan

Doculabs found that Kofax's VRS provides a strong solution for making any document capture process more efficient, because it addresses image quality, document input range, and usability together in a single solution. Through the use of VRS, organizations can reduce their document preparation times, simplify their scanning process, and improve document image quality for OCR applications.

Build vs. Buy: Development Issues in Production Capture

Evaluate a make/buy decision for a document capture product by following the steps and filling out the worksheets. You will be able to make reasonable estimates for the cost of developing a capture application which you can then compare with the cost of purchasing a commercial product.

The Dynamics of Cost in Document and Data Capture

In both document and data capture, savings are measured in seconds, multiplied by thousands of documents. The savings can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a year, especially if the capture system can also improve the quality of the scanned information.