Excellent Planning and Project Management Earn Awards for City of Richland, Washington

Congratulations to the City of Richland, Washington.  Their ECM solution deployed earlier this year has earned  two prestigious awards within the past month. 

In early November, the City of Richland won the   ImageSource Customer Partner Award for best return  on investment.  The award was presented to Jon Amundson, Assistant City Manager and Christina Palmer, Project Manager at Nexus 2009 www.nexusecm.com. 

Last week it was announced that the City of Richland was also named to the Info World top 100 list of IT projects.  The solution consisted of Oracle IPM, Cardiff Liquid Office,  a Bundle of ILINX products http://www.imagesourceinc.com/Products/ILINXProducts/index.htm which were used to extend the capabilities of the Off The Shelf Software.

The vision, professionalism and standard of excellence exhibited by the Richland team is to be commended.  Congratulations, City of Richland!

  

New Directions in ECM

I have been spending a good amount of time talking with ECM users recently.  I am noticing a shift in priorities among these ECM users.  In the past, conversations have been centered around core ECM solutions.  While it is important to select an ECM solution that is appropriate for your organization now, it is probably just as important to have the ability to scale that solution to meet future needs.

The ECM users that I am talking with are interested in integrating their current ECM solution with their line of business systems.  They are also interested in  expanding the abilities of ECM to the enterprise with such enhancements as remote capture, the ability to provide portal access and to rapidly an efficiently respond to requests for information whether in the form of an audit, request for information, or other action. 

Not all ECM solutions providers offer the ability to expand on your COTS solution.  ImageSource, Inc.  has taken the lead in this area.  Check our the ILINX solutions at www.imagesourceinc.com.  ImageSource offers solutions that allow for efficient web based capture, connection with other systems, and sharing of content througout the enterprise.  Check out the website.

  

Nexus 2010 ECM Solutions Conference EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT $195

Nexus 2009 ECM Solutions Conference was a resounding SUCCESS!!

First I would like to thank every single attendee and our valuable sponsors for your enthusiastic participation and support.  Nexus2010 registrations continue to be completed by organizations that understand the value and importance that this event has on the strategic planning of ECM initiatives for their businesses.  Nexus2010 will be held at the Meyedenbauer Convention Center on Nov. 4^th & 5^th – 2010.  We are encouraged of course by the outpouring of positive feedback we have received, we are grateful for each and every comment.  ImageSource will work diligently to again “raise the bar” in all aspects of planning, execution and content delivery.  We are listening on our Nexus Twitter feed for any and all recommendations for speakers, breakouts and special events that you feel would be valuable, so Tweet us!

The Green ECM Video can be found on YouTube so check it out.

We are offering a limited time promotion for early registrations of $195 for a full conference pass. Use discount code NEXUS10SPL.  Register early as we are keeping this event exclusive so seating is limited

Also a reminder of where you can find more information on ECM topics, please add us to your RSS feed and Follow us on Twitter.  Stay tuned for our FaceBook fan sites too.

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Twitter
Nexus ECM Twitter feed http://twitter.com/nexusecm
ImageSource Twitter feed http://twitter.com/imagesourceinc
ILINX Capture Twitter feed http://twitter.com/ilinxcapture
ECM Support Twitter feed http://twitter.com/ecmsupport

Shadrach White
ImageSource, Inc.

In-Process Capture: Who Needs It?

Enterprise imaging and capture has been deployed in most large organizations around the world for many years.  This includes pushing capture out to remote sites in a semi-centralized way.  This approach still has a great deal of overhead in terms of support, maintenance, infrastructure costs, and many times postage to this more localized site.  What if every company could leverage their existing office equipment to capture content at the source, whether it is the organization itself or its customers/partners, to get content in as part of their normal work process? 

Inserting capture in-process allows service level agreements to be achieved or even exceeded, move content/images through the organization quicker and more efficiently, and leverage the knowledge worker’s expertise who are  in front of the customer in a limited, yet simple,  efficient manner.  Who could benefit from this?  Well, just about every company. 

If you are a retail organization setting up a new credit account – imagine scanning the document on the local printer/scanner and it goes off to the financial institution without keying in anything.  So, the cashier can ring other customers as the approval is being sought.  If you’re a distribution company who just dropped off a pallet of goods to a center and that signature can be scanned in from the truck, with an internet connection, to the accounting department to generate an invoice that same day?  Or if you’re a financial services organization and you have high valued customers out on the golf course and you want to get their application in and an account number generated before going to the next hole?  What about a physician’s office who needs to provide a referral, prescription or orders for surgery to a hospital, doctor or pharmacy, so that by the time your really sick patient arrives the process or prescription has already been issued? 

Lets start saving some trees,  maximizing efficiency and providing real customer service with in-process capture!

Michelle Semple
ImageSource, Inc.

Is ECM a Green Technology?

Going green is getting easier as technology develops.  The “paperless office” utopia is still being developed but the amount of paper can be, and is being dramatically reduced due to document imaging and content management solutions.  It is a fairly straightforward concept – if a business process begins with physical paper, why not scan it, index it, and store it where multiple people can access, it is secure, traceable and auditable, and it adheres to your corporate records policy?  This concept does not only save your organization money, but it does reduce the environmental impact of doing business.

It is easy to see the savings in industries such as Health Care and Financial Services.  In Health Care the green factor and carbon footprint reduction relates to the courier cost, fax cost, copying cost of duplicating patient records and insurance correspondence.  This is a huge magnitude when you consider the general health of the population.   Financial Services green footprint is also correlated with courier and copying but also in the workflow process to route documents.

There is great information published on this topic at various sites such as AIIM , and also at AIIM.  There is also interesting case examples at  New and Good in ECM.

Distributed scanning  can also have a directly positive impact on a green initiative.  Capturing documents and data at the point of creation or receipt will save on shipping and courier services which also impacts the environment by reducing the oil consumption in transportation. 

The digitizing of documents greatly reduces off-site storage costs which also has a direct effect on oil consumption used in the transportation to and from the storage facilities. 

Much of the transition from paper to electronic comes with the paradigm shift from physically handling paper to viewing documents and data and routing them from the computer.  This takes time and facilitates true change management disciplines but the amount of money, efficiencies, and resources saved can be tremendous.  To be successful, you need to plan for the initial pushback from the knowledge workers.  In the beginning, they might even print more than what they were before the implementation.  If change is managed correctly, the users will adopt and embrace the efficiencies.

The going green concept is growing and is a focal point of the upcoming Nexus ECM Conference held on Nov 2-3 in Bellevue, WA.  Take a look at the Nexus Agenda for some of the “green” sessions.  

Comments and feedback welcome.

Jeff Blissett
Senior Account Executive
ImageSource, Inc.
www.imagesourceinc.com

Benefits of System Integration

Enterprise Content Managment solutions can be expensive.  I have talked with many organizations who see just the cost of implementing solutions and see the benefits as just faster retrieval of information stored in the system. 

Integration of your ECM solution with your line of business systems can greatly improve the return on the invstment that you have made in ECM.  Think about how often you are researching employee data in your Human Resources System and suddenly realize that you need actual documents that relate to that data.  You have and ECM system, the problem is that it is not connected to your HR system.  At best you toggle back and forth between screens to get everything you need (maybe clicking on the wrong application and taking extra time. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could access the documents directly from your HR system?

Integration of systems contributes to business intelligence.  How often are you collecting information from multiple systems, often wondering if you have it all.  Sometimes this is just an annoyance.  Sometimes it can be a very expensive annoyance.  Integration used to be a complicated time consuming endeavor.  Now, with integration solutions such as ILINX Connect http://www.imagesourceinc.com/Products/ILINXProducts/ApplicationIntegration/index.htm a single solution can be used to integrate multiple systems using the same procedures for each integration.  How easy can it get?  Want to learn more?  Nexus 2009 http://nexusecm.com/index.htm is coming to Bellevue, Washington on November 2-3.  Come to Nexus and learn more about how integration of your systems can help your bottom line!

Kathleen Fish
ImageSource, Inc.

  

Document Scanning Best Practices

Content Management Systems are one of the most useful resources companies have available to keep their managers, staff, and customers informed. Managing those files effectively is an ongoing challenge, but a well-planned, best practices implementation makes it significantly easier. Most Content Management Systems start with Scanning as the starting point in the lifecycle of any document. The decision of whether to go with a centralized or distributed scanning model must be carefully evaluated to see which may be a better fit for the organization. Many times a hybrid model of both remote and centralized is required and becoming more popular. When it is done designed and implemented correctly scanning ensures that the data stored in the document management repository is valid, readable, secure, accessible, and useful throughout the enterprise.

Some important things to remember when deploying document a document scanning system:

• Establish clear goals and objectives before you start or deploy a Document Scanning System.
• Establish clear and concise business rules around your company’s requirements.
• Consult a well established Systems Integrator with the knowledge and expertise to help you with defining “Best Practices for Document Scanning” and always check references.
• Understand the nature of your documents, the quality of many documents may be poor, this in turn will require you to use Image Enhancement Technologies that will automatically clean up the document and improve its readability. These types of technologies are a must especially when utilizing OCR or any advanced form of capture.
• Scanning and especially the Indexing of documents can be somewhat laborious, so anything to help automate these tasks such as Bar Coding, OCR, database lookups and electronic forms will make life a lot easier.
• Use the KISS Principle in dealing with data taxonomy and avoid capturing too many fields, but make sure it’s enough to do valuable searches.   Here at ImageSource we try to have 10 document types maximum and 8 data fields which allows for effective searches, retrieval and reporting.

Lastly, don’t lose sight of your short and long term goals, do your homework and study your documents and see how they fit into your business lifecycle and corporate governance. Talk with people throughout you organization and get their input to better understand your documents are used. Finally, if you’re unsure get help, this is not an area where you can afford a mistake. Remember, it all starts with getting information into the system.

Bob Garrido

Senior Account Executive

ImageSource

Distributed Capture Allows In-Process Workflow Enablement

In traditional capture environments, organizations are submitting their documents, whether in fax or scanned form, in batches.
The ability to submit ad-hoc documents using existing hardware like MFPs/MFDs or scanners is the current momentum in enterprises. Reaching beyond this takes forward, out of the ordinary thinking.

How would it be in an enterprise organization to actually place a single document into their local MFP/MFD and submit that work directly in to the workflow allowing the documents to be processed that same day? Inserting lab orders from physician’s offices directly to ancillary services? Placing a new account opening document directly in the workflow queue to get approval and an account number? Scanning bills of lading at the shipping and receiving dock and having them go straight to accounts payable and automatically matched with the PO?

We’ve seen many large financial services organizations start to leverage in-process distributed capture in an ad-hoc collection and capture form. Having a simple user interface, minimal clicks at the front panel of an MFP/MFD, as well as very little learning curve has been essential. What could your organization do if everyone could easily scan/import documents so they could get placed in the repository, data base, legacy system or workflow right away? How many millions of dollars would be saved? How many redundant workers would be allocated to jobs needing more workers?

Michelle Semple
Account Executive
ImageSource, Inc.

Distributed Scanning – Sales Perspective

“This is going to be the year that document imaging really takes off.  This is the year…………. “.  The adoption of storing files with a standard naming convention on shared drives is still being forced around corporate America when the technology has been around for 20 years to securely scan, index, store, and retrieve in a single repository.  What makes us think that the concept of having scanners at every desk or even on the same physical floor is going to catch on in the 20 years? 

 “When it is easy enough for the CEO to scan documents from his office, we know that document imaging is mainstream. “ In the industry, we have all heard this claim of the past 20 years.  We have had visions of every organization, big or small, regardless of industry, deploying scanners and efficiently capturing paper documents at the source of receipt.  Multi-Function Devices (copiers that scan and fax) have now become mainstream where most people are comfortable in scanning a document and feel comfortable with the concept. – This is the easy part.  The reason we still fight with adoption is that traditional document capture  software that allows for the scanning  and indexing, has been difficult to understand, use AND had to be loaded on every person’s desktop that wanted to scan and index their documents.

 Internet security, reduced file sizes, increased bandwidth, web services, and development of web parts have all been in development high gear.  Companies that have been focusing on these technologies and disciplines have made significant breakthroughs in the Distributed Capture / Remote Scanning marketplace.  See Kofax, Cardiff, EMC / Captiva, ImageSource / ILINX, Oracle / Captovation, ReadSoft.  Out are the complex interfaces that require understanding of terms such as batches, document classes, OCR.  In are the simple interfaces that allow for the scanning at a push of a single button, simple drop down menus, and few key strokes.  Web based scanning applications should be commonplace where the user can scan a document from anywhere, provide simple indexing functionality, start a workflow, and have the document committed to the secure repository.  The concept of “collecting” documents and taking / sending / Fed Ex’ing them to the mail room or scanning supervisor for processing is now not necessary / antiquated / a big waste of time.  The technology is here and now.

Distributed Capture solutions should be thin client, scalable, not linked to a page count, able to support multiple ECM systems, and require little to no training.   This shouldn’t be too much to ask.

 How long is it going to take to get the message out to the masses?  Will this be the year of distributed capture?  Comments and feedback welcome.

Jeff Blissett
Senior Account Executive
ImageSource, Inc.

SharePoint ECM Gaps, Should you be concerned?

I have been in this ECM industry for over 10 years and have never seen a product grow as fast as MicroSoft SharePoint -  MOSS 2007.  Nearly every organization that I have visited recently has some version of SharePoint in-house. I ask myself, “What are these gaps that I keep hearing about and how are they affecting these organizations? Is it affecting their ability to control documents and are they compromising security of critical information?”

Understanding these gaps and knowing some excellent third party application tools will help assure success of your SharePoint initiatives. Many of these issues will be covered at the Nexus 2009 event held in Belleview, WA on November 2nd and 3rd. I have found several organizations that have experienced stalls or cancellations on certain project initiatives due to lack of understanding these gaps and what tools are available to help them.

Some SharePoint gaps include Management, Audit and Security functionality. I want to point out the gaps in Imaging, Metadata and Search functionality. SharePoint has shown limited ability to scan and index large volumes of documents. Also missing is the ability to do discreet or constrained searches. I have found an excellent third party application, KnowledgeLake,  that is perfect for handling these gaps.

KnowledgeLake has developed a suite of software products on the .net platform that works directly with SharePoint. These tools give you the ability to scan high volumes of documents, hard copy and electronic, fast and easy, add metadata (including data extraction from LOB’s) and more importantly the ability to do discreet searches.

If you are seriuos about taking advantage of the ECM portion of SharePoint then you owe it to yourself to research the award winning KnowledgeLake products.

Scott Allbert -  Senior Account Executive – ImageSource, Inc   (951) 526-2681