Classified Information: How to Get the Competitive Business Advantage

The concept of the paperless office is one that organisations are making committed strides towards, yet while documents such as Standing Order, Authority to Transfer or Direct Debit forms remain on paper, there is the need to route them through the system as efficiently as possible, as well as simultaneously capturing information received from other channels.

The ability to handle inbound documents quickly and accurately is vital to any organisation, and increasingly, operational efficiency is dependent on the ability to capture incoming information and process it through business workflows quickly and precisely.

This is where data capture technology comes in.  Implemented correctly, imaging and data capture solutions can dramatically enhance business efficiency and in turn improve service delivery to customers, helping to give you the competitive advantage in the market. 

Deploying the right technology allows documents to be handled and routed as efficiently as possible, helping to unblock the corporate workflow and bringing benefits in both customer service and reduced costs.

The business case for data capture adds up

Processing customer documents and other incoming mail can be extremely labour intensive, but by deploying customised data capture and workflow solutions, document processes can be streamlined, increasing efficiency and enabling you to offer competition-beating levels of response.

Companies with advanced automation solutions can achieve a tenfold increase in efficiency.  For example, a full time AP employee can process around 8500 invoices per year using manual processes, yet data capture solutions process upward of 80,000 invoices per person per year – an increase in productivity which can help to significantly improve customer service as well as reducing costs. 

Alliance & Leicester automated their account switching process from end-to-end, to fully automate the process of setting up current accounts for new customers and transferring direct debits and standing orders.  The result was a dramatic improvement in efficiency, with processing time being cut by 400% and costs reduced by 66%.  Furthermore the benefits to customer service by guaranteeing a faster and hassle-free service resulted in new customer numbers being doubled.

Delivering on customer service, nationwide

Information reaches organisations through a range of different methods; paper, fax, email and attachments, and via the Internet, and it is important that all documents are processed in the same manner regardless of how they enter the organisation. The ability to combine and co-ordinate information arriving through these different modes of communication is key to good customer service delivery.

It’s also important to factor in a local capability for regional offices and branches.  By enabling regional offices and branches to scan incoming documents locally, the information can be quickly inputted into central business operations.  This information can then be shared efficiently amongst teams, and acted upon in a timelier manner.

By reducing the time it takes for customer documents to enter your business workflows, the faster you can respond to their needs. Increasingly organisations are scanning customer documents at remote sites/branches for immediate delivery into centralised processes, allowing instant and secure transfer of both images and data. 

Using classified information, intelligently

Mailroom Automation allows incoming documents to be scanned and routed to the correct department/recipient as efficiently as possible. The rate-determining step which is crucial to the success of mailroom automation is the quick classification of all scanned documents followed by the application of auto-indexing techniques via OCR and ICR technologies.

80% of the information used by an organisation is in the form of unstructured paper documents, yet until recently automatic processing was limited to documents with a fixed structure.  As a result, organisations that scan and capture their documents needed to invest a large amount of time and effort, sorting these documents prior to scanning, adding document separation sheets and manually classifying the document prior to data extraction.  All of this resulted in a considerable amount of skilled sorting work both before and after scanning.

To address this issue, auto-classification and recognition techniques further automate document handling by removing the need for intensive, manual post room sorting and document preparation tasks – all of which helps to dramatically reduce overall processing costs.

Extracting the right information

Intelligent automation software (such as Indicius and Xtrata from Kofax), provides advanced document classification, separation and extraction capabilities. OCR tools can then automatically extract machine-printed or hand-printed text and printed data from scanned document images, eliminating costly and time-consuming manual keying.

The additional extracted data provides valuable document intelligence to further streamline the separation and process-routing of the document to a workflow queue, so that the document can be indexed for storage or sent directly to a business process.

Extracting the right recipient detail or identifying account number means documents can be automatically routed to the right process destination – for example insurance claims being routed to the correct legal team, and invoices to the finance Invoice Processing system.

After being scanned, images and the extracted data are usually released to a document management system or image repository to ensure security, safe archiving and auditability. This is vital to avoid lost documents. If the document management system links to core business systems such as ERP or CRM, this further automates and enhances processes.

Let’s take a look at a real-life case study, to demonstrate how theory is put into practice within the business environment.

Unified document processing solution manages 220,000 images per day for finance sector clients
The world’s leading provider of customised Corporate Information Solutions in the Financial Services Sector, decided to deploy an advanced document processing solution, in order to handle the 220,000 pages of insurance documentation it receives every day as efficiently as possible.

Handling such a large volume of mail, faxes and email from the UK’s largest financial institutions led to the company looking for an effective and resilient mail handling solution to ensure timely distribution and that service level agreements are met.

Working closely with Basware, the company developed a scanning and indexing solution which uses Kofax software to process all incoming mail, faxes and emails, allowing them to be automatically distributed to the respective processing teams.

The solution provides a valuable audit trail, which proves that mail has been received, handled and distributed in a timely way, and that service level agreements have been met.  It does this by tracking mail from when it reaches the company giving each document a unique number; images are created using Kofax scanning technology.

The unified document processing and data capture solution has the flexibility to handle all mail received and distribute documents to all clients - this not only enables the company to meet its own service level agreements, but also enables its clients in the financial sector to deliver timely and efficient customer service. 

Getting the business upper hand

Effective and rapid document classification is a critical element of a successful mailroom automation solution.  Deployed properly, it not only improves your internal business processes, but also streamlines and enhances service delivery to customers.

It is this ability to accelerate transactions, and to meet and indeed exceed service level agreements that can provide financial organisations with a unique selling point and competitive advantage in terms of service offering.

Surely you should be thinking about using your classified information more effectively?

www.basware.co.uk / 01606 331234