How to Tell if Your Advanced Capture Solution is Optimized to Give You the Most Benefit

We recently covered common reasons your system may be underutilized and what you can do about it. This time, we’re digging into another common issue: identifying when systems are not running optimally.  

Let’s begin with document capture solutions. 

Signs Your Advanced Capture Operation Has Room for Improvement and Growth: 

• Your team is manually organizing documents before scanning them. A lot of organizations still perform document batch preparation before capturing them into their content management system. The manual process (which involves organizing documents into a specific order and using separator sheets or barcodes to signal a new document) takes time and effort and ironically creates the exact opportunities for error your system is designed to eliminate.  

• You’re seeing an increase in the amount of manual data entry. You’ve had your Advanced Capture system for a while, and it’s running on autopilot. Form data is located, extracted, and indexed, and everything seems to work efficiently. But then you notice your staff spending more time on data entry tasks than they used to, stealing time from other activities. If so, you may be experiencing what we call “drift” in performance.  

• You’re only using Advanced Capture for some document types. Your organization runs on multiple types of information, from data in database rows and columns to document-based text. By most estimates, unstructured data comprises the bulk of content that organizations require to execute processes. If you’re not using Advanced Capture to intake and index unstructured and table data, you’re only receiving a fraction of its potential benefit.  

What to Do if Your Organization is Under-Utilizing Advanced Capture:

Advanced Capture software has come a long way since the days of TIFF images and simple scan/store/retrieve processes. One area of significant advancement is automated document classification. Not only can today’s systems understand different types of documents, but they can also automatically identify and separate different documents – even those stored within a single PDF file. Imagine letting the system do the work for you instead of investing precious staff time to sort and organize stacks of documents for capture.  

Drift is a common outcome when certain elements of a process change without adjustments across the board. Like any type of system where performance is expected, alterations can often go undetected until processes start to slow. Most of the time, the core issue is a system’s inability to reliably locate required data fields. Root causes for drift include things like changes in scanner hardware or configurations that cause shifting or scaling issues. Another issue might be a new form design that impacts the placement of data fields. In both cases, your Advanced Capture solution will need an update to function optimally with the current hardware, configuration, and form layout. 

If you’re not using Advanced Capture software on your most document-intensive processes, then you’re not getting the full value of your system. Admittedly configuring Advanced Capture software to support multiple business processes is a big undertaking, but solution implementation is a one-time investment vs. the time costs of ongoing document preparation and data entry. Experts like those at ImageSource can offer guidance on how to prioritize advanced capture projects to make things easier.  

Once a system is installed and configured, the work often only has just begun. This is especially so for systems where performance and accuracy are key factors used to evaluate ROI. Embrace a continual improvement mindset in order to squeeze every last bit of value from your system.  

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Need to diagnose a capture system issue or run a performance audit? ImageSource is here for you. Reach out and let us know how we can help!

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