A Blueprint for Enterprise Content Capture

In our series of articles on electronic content capture (ECC) we have discussed a number of high-level premises which, when employed, provide an enterprise the opportunity for significant savings, improved operating efficiencies, streamlined processes and procedures, reduced personnel requirements, AND leveraging investment by external business partners.

Let’s review the major segments and objectives of an optimized ECC deployment.

First, we want to facilitate document or data acquisition as close to the point of origination as possible: Up to and including providing the opportunity for strategic business partners to participate in your process as a function of theirs; thereby leveraging their EDM (electronic document management) investment and effort, and as a result, reducing your ECC costs.

Distributed capture systems; effective use of multi-function devices (MFD); and fax, email, and data import are all part of this aspect. Think of them as “on ramps” for documents and data to your ECC capability. The objective is to make it as easy as possible for people to interact by making document submission a normal part of the business process. One-button processing is one such goal.

Second, we want to facilitate document and transaction perfection within ECC whenever possible. The objective here is to only release and submit documents and data that can be worked by the business process. By moving perfection processes (“Pend, Suspend, Rescan, Waiting on Corrections, etc.”) and all the logistics involved with that effort into ECC, throughput within the business unit will be dramatically increased.

As all the steps necessary for document and transaction perfection are largely the same, they can be facilitated from a central source. By centralizing this function, it eliminates design, develop, test and train, and maintenance requirements of those sub-flows within the individual business process workflows. This is also very helpful to IT departments as it reduces the overall amount of regressive testing required for upgrades or process enhancements as it exists in a single or central deployment and the total number of processes to test is reduced.

Third, you want to make use of “Post Process Adaptors” (PPAs) in the ECC deployment. A large enterprise is likely to have a number of different application or departmental processing requirements running over various operating systems. It is common to see a mix of Windows, Unix, and Mainframe-based applications that all require document and data input.

A PPA is an adaptor that takes standard output from the capture systems and formats the documents and data for a particular business process or application submission. This gives you the ability to isolate and control specific departure points within the entire process. This, in turn, provides you with the capability to use a common resource to feed any number of software applications, platforms, and/or protocols. This can be a significant advantage when the time arrives for maintenance and upgrades. If you have an upgrade to the capture system all you have to test is the capture system itself up to the capture side of the PPA. If you make a modification to a particular business process or OS, you only have to test from the application side of the PPA. This significantly reduces the amount of regression testing across multiple applications and platforms and allows work to be done in certain areas without affecting others.

Fourth, and no less important than any of the others, is to create and deploy monitoring, reconciliation, and alert components that watch over the entire ECC area of operation.

When you take full advantage of the ECC concept, you will notice a transformation of your business process which will create the need for new requirements as regards identifying and resolving problems with your process. That is: You no longer have a visceral indication that something is wrong. (There is no paper piling up, no visual indicators and, as the process was optimized from a throughput standpoint, the problem you don’t see can grow at exponential rates.) Compounding the scenario is the reality that there is probably fewer employees around due to the optimization to deal with the problem once you do discover it. Think of a wildfire.

These MRA (Monitor, Reconcile, Alert) systems keep tabs on the health of the overall process from an operational standpoint (servers, background processes, data throughput, disk space, etc.), compare the items submitted from the ECC to the items received by the business application and proactively set alerts for any discrepancies in any of those areas in real time. It’s not enough to know you are within 20% of maxing out your storage capacity.

It’s just as important to know how fast you are getting there—that way, you’ll know how much time you have to deal with the problem. In a 24x7 and/or high-volume processing environment, in order to allow enough time from an alert mechanism, you may have to set your reporting at 50% of your drive space, as example, in order to deal with a problem in a timely manner. All of which would be useless from a practical standpoint in an environment where the “High Water Mark” on drive space is a constantly moving target with the ebb and flow of documents and data in and out of the process.

From a design standpoint these systems should, optimally, be more than threshold alerts. To really do their job they also need to address the overall “rate of change” or the rate you are approaching a particular threshold.

The objective with these systems is to reduce the overall amount of “intra and post event drama” which can occur from a catastrophic outage by preventing from occurring in the first place.

Framing all this up from a graphical standpoint and the concept may look like this:

Bill Johnson has been in the Process Improvement field for over 30 years the last 18 at the helm of a successful EDMS Systems Integrator providing highly effective document imaging, ERM, Records Management & Workflow solutions to virtually every sector of the market. He has recently formed Result Oriented Solutions, Inc., (www.ros-inc.com) a consulting firm dedicated to the EDMS industry specializing in optimized capture solutions, application architecture & design, project management and opportunity/environmental assessments.