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TECHNOLOGY: Are Documents Drowning Your Business‘
Recent Gauteng Business News
Helping customers to find the best deals and switch providers is now a business in itself. Add to this the cost pressure exerted on businesses to aggressively market their capabilities and to address internal issues such as control and regulatory compliance, and its no surprise that many are feeling overwhelmed, says Senger.
EOH Application Management, a business unit of EOH, one of the largest IT service providers on the African continent is the master distributor of Kofaxs entire solution portfolio to value added resellers (VARs) and system integrators in South Africa.
Many businesses have identified the handling of incoming documents from customers and suppliers as a key area of cost and risk to their business, says Ursula Dorfling, Kofax Channel Manager at EOH Application Management. Documents such as application forms, letters, invoices and sales orders flood through the mail room, on fax machines and into email boxes every day and they all must be dealt with promptly and efficiently to keep the business moving and customers happy.
Paper documents present a particular challenge, says Senger. They are easy to lose, hard to trace and it is difficult to distribute them effectively without incurring costs and increasing security risk. But hold on. Werent we supposed to all go paperless about 20 years ago‘ Clearly this has not happened yet and its not going to happen soon either. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, there are over four trillion paper documents in the US alone and they are growing at a rate of 22 percent per year.
To alleviate the problems that document handling presents and to stay competitive, industry leaders are investing in enterprise document and data capture solutions that enable them to efficiently ingest all incoming documents and efficiently convert them to actionable business data using scanning and recognition technologies.
Automating capture is often a key element of a wider business process automation initiative, says Senger. Businesses can invest in electronic workflow to formalise their processes, to deliver data to the right person at the right time and to trigger outbound communication to a customer, but until the information is in the system nothing happens no customers served, no sales orders fulfilled, no invoices paid. And thats where capture steps in.
Businesses that invest in enterprise capture achieve fast delivery of high-quality information to people, processes and systems, increasing the speed and agility at which they do business. Because every document is converted to a digital format as soon as it is received, access to documents is easier to control so data security is improved. It also substantially reduces labour costs as a result of the vast reduction in manual document handling and data entry, explains Senger.
Dorfling says the resulting ROI, typically achieved in less than a year, makes investing in enterprise capture a logical option. The current growth in the market for capture is evidence of this. The global market for capture to feed a business process is growing at just shy of 10 percent year-on-year and the trend is set to continue. Furthermore this trend is similar in Africa and more pertinently South Africa, though it may be more specific by industry. We see a massive growth in industries where compliance and corporate governance play a major role
Renowned English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase the survival of the fittest in the 19th century. It is pertinent to take a look at the way your business handles documents and to ask yourself whether your business is fit to survive‘ concludes Dorfling.
Business News Sector Tags: Infotech|