Unlocking the power of paper documents for your enterprise

Even in
this digital age of cloud computing and big data, the stacks of paper documents
that sit atop your office desk still hold tremendous power. Power that can
streamline processes, increase operational efficiency and transform your
enterprise into a well-oiled machine.

Unfortunately,
most leaders don’t see that value in paper. In fact, even employees are known
to have a negative perception of paper-based processes. A study conducted by a
reputable software company shows that more than half of the respondents deemed paper
to be a hindrance to productivity. The survey also revealed that an overall
negative attitude towards these procedures exists amongst those surveyed.

With so
much ‘bad press’ around good ol’ paper, it is high time we explore how to
intelligently manage your enterprise’s deluge of paper to increase productivity,
enhance Customer Relations Management, data analytics operations and disaster
recovery procedures.

Today’s
enterprises face an overwhelming amount of inbound information in the form of structured
and unstructured data. Structured data consists of information that can be more
easily organized by traditional databases. The problem is the influx of unstructured
data tends to outweigh its counterpart.  For
example, in the healthcare sector, almost 80 percent of medical data is unstructured[1].

Paper
documents such as invoices, faxes and receipts that organizations encounter on
a daily basis, are common forms of unstructured data that – when not handled
properly – can reduce operational efficiency. Enterprises must understand that
since physical documents are a main source of unstructured data, tackling them
from the get-go can halt the onset of information management problems arising
from paper.

Intelligent
document capture is key to improving paper-based workflow processes.
Ironically, the first step to that is taken by enabling efficient scanning of
hardcopy documents. That first step is so straightforward, most people tend to
overlook its potential to enhance the speed of their company’s operations. Key
factors such as scanning speed, paper size, paper jam detection and quality
capturing of image and information are often considerations left out when investing
in scanners.

Apart from
simply scanning and converting hardcopy materials into softcopy versions, the
digitized assets must also become fully searchable electronic documents. Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) technology is key for this stage as it allows the
digitized assets to have their contents recognized not just by human users, but
by artificial intelligence (AI). Enabling AI to ‘read’ digital copies of paper
documents streamlines workflow processes and enable various users in the
enterprise to effortlessly harness information stored in the original paper
files.

Intelligent
document capture results in the optimization of paper-based workflow processes
and benefits certain departments such as customer service, IT and the data
analytics team.

For
example, valuable information submitted by a customer through paper forms can
now be rapidly archived and integrated to a CRM database. The integration will
provide customer service officers with a more holistic view of their company’s
interactions with said customer and enable the officers to tailor their
responses accordingly.

From a
disaster recovery standpoint (DR), IT can also stand to benefit. The irony of
most company’s DR strategies is that paper assets – including those that
contain mountains of crucial information – tend to neglected during backup. Compared
to creating duplicates of digital data, copying paper documents and easily
finding the information stored is feat unachievable by most I.T departments. With
intelligent document capture, the backing up of paper documents becomes
seamless and can be a natural part of DR.

Last but
not least, because raw information from disparate paper sources can be easily
extracted and converted into useful data, the analytics team of any enterprise
will be able to have more fuel to gain actionable insights from.

In essence,
paper documents still hold tremendous weight for enterprises today. Leaders
should rethink the role of paper and the value of information stored within
their hardcopy assets. By leveraging intelligence document capture, enterprises
can enhance their information management process by streaming paper-based
workflow sequences. Such optimization can benefit the enterprise’s Customer
Relations Management, Disaster Recovery and data analytics strategy.