The term capture often refers to the processes of scanning, text recognition, image correction and identifying form fields and bar codes. All these combine to yield the final output, provided as an appropriate format for data processing and subsequent storage. For over a couple of decades,
data capture processes have served as the entry points for business process management or BPM, forms processing, document storage and retrieval system and workflow management. Capture may also refer to the processing of emails, faxes, messages, electronic documents and images.
Over the years, the processes of document capture and
document scanning have been recognised as extremely challenging. Getting high volumes of information captured from documents can require the recruitment of skilled staff and specialist machinery. This often necessitates the hiring of outsourcers and service bureaus. Previously people have been reluctant in making investments in capture technology. In that case, manual keying expenses have been minimised owing to cheaper communications and considerably low offshore labour rates. This makes it easier to combine onshore scanning processes with the help of offshore remote keying as part of the corporate legacy system.
The use of high capacity and reliable scanning systems, the availability of multifunctional printers and scanners in most organisations and the use of automated capture processes has led to the emergence and increasing popularity of a distributed scanning system over the last five to six years. When it comes to particular scan-to-archive applications, especially with respect to the healthcare and service sector, the policy of a scanner per desk appears to be viable.
There has been a lot of research conducted in the field to take into account the different prevalent approaches. The key findings indicate that:
Distributed scanning and multi-functional printers are all set for growth in comparison to processes such as centralised document scanning.
Irrespective of the long term strategies that have been in use so far, the sale of dedicated scanning hardware is likely to drop. MFPs on the other hand, might just succeed in maintaining their hold on the market. Capture modules and software solutions may be the sole area where expenses might increase.
Centralised mailroom and in-house scanning solutions are expected to gain in terms of their popularity in addition to outsourced capture and scanning.
Automated recognition techniques such as ICR, OCR and automated classification techniques are also gaining in popularity.
Knowledge management tools are all directed towards improving the search for business documents and are perhaps the greatest driving force behind more and more business processes choosing to opt for scanning. These are followed by compliance to regulated business practices and also the necessity to improve business processes.
The legal admissibility of documents that have been scanned is still a point of debate for a large number of businesses.
Keeping up with the demands of fast turnaround is cited as the greatest issue as far as central scanning operations is concerned and is closely followed by space and logistical problems.
The greatest challenge of using a distributed scanning process is that of indexing. Trained staff are required to index the documents properly or automated technologies can be set up to identify and index each document which can improve performance and maintain the quality of the indexing over a period of time.
Document scanning solutions have emerged as a popular choice for several sectors and are quickly gaining in popularity.
