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Make Capture an Everyday Front-Office Activity

The newest strategies in capture suggest shifting the capture of information from a centralized back-office process and extending it to an everyday front-office activity. This enables workers to scan-enable the business applications they already use, automate the integration of paper and electronic documents directly into those business processes, and leverage IT standards for integration with existing business applications to meet regulatory requirements for document traceability — all while enhancing responsive turn-around retrieval processing conducive to enhanced customer satisfaction.

Historically, the processing of interactions was predominately a centralized, high volume, batch function; but this is rapidly changing. The sale of distributed capture devices provides an indicator of this changing landscape. In the last three years, unit sales of high-volume scanners have been flat, whereas unit sales of workgroup scanners grew by 80% each year and are expected to grow an additional 40% through 2009. Accordingly, demand for ad-hoc capture solutions used by knowledge workers is rapidly increasing.

There is also a shift toward transactional capture solutions that enable organizations to directly and reliably integrate capture and exchange solutions into their IT infrastructure, such as supply chain management; content management; and enterprise resource planning applications. Overall, the shift is toward business process automation that minimizes the potential for failure that can (and often does) occur between the time a document is created and the time it is consumed by an application.

According to Kofax, these leading market indicators demonstrate a need for intelligent process automation where information capture and exchange becomes part of an integrated life cycle management process.