Let me first state, that PDF is not the ONLY file format available and won't be the ONLY file format that should be used for archiving, turning a revisable electronic documents into a ePaper documents or for exchanging documents. For now, it is available, accepted and is very robust. This robust nature was what prompted NPES and the Graphics Communications Industry along with Adobe Systems to develop what was the first of several specific focused PDF standards to satisfy the needs of prepress printing of advertisements (ISO 15930). From here, we developed variations for archiving (ISO 19005), engineering (ISO 24517), healthcare, universal accessibility (ISO 14289), variable data exchange (ISO 16612) and others. Each of these PDF subset standards was developed to satisfy a specific industry need.

The fact that many variations of the PDF standard were developed all based on the PDF Specification shows the versatility of the PDF specification. It is important to remember that even the PDF specification is now an open standard no longer controlled solely by Adobe Systems.  In 2007, Adobe Systems approached AIIM (www.aiim.org/standards ) requesting that AIIM help foster the PDF Specification through the ISO standardization process. On behalf of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute (www.ansi.org), AIIM did just that and ISO was able to publish the PDF specification as ISO 32000-1 in 2008. Yes, Adobe Systems is a player in the development of ISO 32000 and its subsequent versions but there are a host of other PDF developers at the table including Microsoft who along with NetCentric Technologies are the current project leaders for the work on ISO 32000-2.

The work on the PDF standards marches onward. With each part of the standard, the file format becomes even more feature rich and better. The ISO working groups will be meeting next week in Canada to focus their attention on the PDF standards as well as on other topics such as trusted repositories, quality issues, document management vocabulary and many other topics.

We should remember that PDF is here and available now.  Until an alternate file format is available, let's work together to make this one better. If there are problems with PDF or if there is something you wish PDF did that it does not do today, send your ideas to me at bfanning@aiim.org or post your ideas as comments to this blog post. I will take them forward to the appropriate PDF committee.

When an alternate file format becomes available, make sure you are making an intelligent decision as you decide to adopt it. Some of the factors you should consider when deciding to go to another file format are:

• Maturity of definition – Is it based on a beta or draft standard or is it based upon a published standard?
• Adoption – Have the solution providers developed products that support the standard? How many solutions support the standard? How many files have been created using the standard file format?
• Endurance – How long has the standard been available? Are there any implementations of the standard?
• Product standards vs infrastructure standards based – Is the standard developed for a limited number of products or limited to a specific operating system or is it technology neutral and able to be used by many products?

In addition to the above, you should also give consideration to the sustainability of the file format you choose. In another blog post, I will deal the characteristics of sustainable file formats.

While PDF may not be the perfect file format, it is what we currently have to work with. As we wait, remember that you have an opportunity to make the current file formats as good as they can be by making recommendations for improvements to the standards upon which the file formats are based.

For more information on standards, please visit http://www.aiim.org/standards.
 

Like any tool, product or service, we hire paper to do stuff for us, to perform a job. Given all of the angst and pain associated with paper, it’s pretty clear that the heat that surrounds the paperless office debate reflects the frustration that many people feel about the gap between the job that paper performs today and the job that we really want documents to do.

Our business and personal lives move fast, as fast as we can make decisions and complete tasks. The last 20 years of computing innovation have shown us the light. The potential for immediate access to valuable, insightful information in the form of documents and data that can drive accurate decisions can literally be placed in the palm of our hand with smartphones and tablets. Customers, partners, and suppliers all want to simplify how they interact with each other, pushing information access closer and closer to the place and point in time where product and services requests begin. It’s at this point, the Point of Origination™, where documents start to drive critical decision making business processes.

Paper documents are key drivers at the Point of Origination and the “office” is one of the critical locations where business processes begin. We can easily turn paper into electronic documents. We have access to OCR text conversion capabilities, we have document and content management solutions and process automation solutions, and we have capture and Touchless Processing, but still no paperless office. So if the problem is not paper, could it be something that’s missing in the “office” that is holding up the paperless era, increasing the stress and latency in decision making processes?

When we look at how people process paper and documents in general, one of the critical problems has been the difficult challenge of manually extracting data and content to import into process automation solutions and make them work. In recent years that problem has been solved with capture based Touchless Processing solutions.  BUT those solutions were initially designed and deployed in production environments that are manned by trained, skilled users. Could that be THE problem? Is manual data entry at the Point of Origination, including “offices”, the last major barrier to the paperless office and faster, more accurate decision making?

Let’s think about it for a moment. The only way office workers can extract the critical and insightful data and content from documents, paper or electronic, is by reading each document and manually keying in the right data. That job sucks and it just creates more problems through human error, inconsistent processes, etc. Touchless Processing solutions solve that problem but weren’t originally available in a form factor that meets the requirements for customers and customer facing employees.

Wait a minute; why not just ship everything to a central source or third party for processing? Do customers, suppliers and partners care if they have to wait three more days or three more weeks for a decision?  I guess if we are feeling lazy, have no competitors and like the status quo that would be fine. But most organizations can’t afford that luxury and office workers are the people who tend to initiate those critical processes that actually generate revenue and profits or deliver critical services. But with traditional Touchless Processing solutions they aren’t managing the capture and entry of the information.

The optimal time and place where the discussions begin and data and information in the form of documents are first gathered, the Point of Origination, is where the power of process automation delivers the greatest potential.  Remember we all move fast and are constantly trying to move faster. Mobile devices and 24/7 web portal access to most of what we seek to buy and manage set an expectation that the companies we do business with should be able to provide fast accurate answers to our requests. If an organization wants to be in the purchase discussion with its customers, its customer facing employees need to be ready when each customer shows up at a website or walks through the doors of a branch office. Without capture at the Point of Origination and Touchless Processing, customer facing employees will be left to their own devices to scan and manually key in data, breaking security and compliance policies as they go, rightfully whining about the inefficiency of it all.

But isn’t Touchless Processing only available for production environments? That was true a few years ago, but this is 2012, change happens fast. As it turns out, organizations can enable document capture with Touchless Processing at the Point of Origination for just about any process. Current capture platforms with these capabilities have been integrated to support mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, multifunction printers (MFPs) and network scanners, web portals and even personal PC connected scanners and MFPs. These common office and personal scan enabled device platforms provide access to the critical automatic data extraction and transparent business rules that perform the core job we most want to do when managing documents. With Touchless Processing deployed at the Point of Origination, we can efficiently unlock the critical, insightful data we’ve always needed from documents, deliver accurate decisions at internet speeds and finally let the paperless office rest in peace.

To find out more about capture at the Point of Origination and see some sample use cases, you can read this related blog on Kofax.com.

What do a Moving company, a Veterinary clinic and a Naturopathic healthcare provider all have in common?

They are all very different professions. Relocating a military family has little do with getting your dog spike neutered or having a far east medical treatment like acupuncture performed.

There are actually several common threads for computing needs. They all require scheduling, billing, customer databases, email, word processing, and spreadsheet software. I have found that several common toolsets are used such as Microsoft Office, Exchange Server, and FileMaker Pro. What is drastically different is the software applications specifically designed for each profession.

The biggest common thread and where each of these business want efficiency is paperwork. Managing the paper that is used to facilitate so many of the daily operations in each of these businesses has always been a challenge. Over the last ten years the software applications that exist for these service oriented businesses have all incorporated scanning features that allow users to simply buy a scanner and start attaching files to scheduling, customer information, and financial records.

This can lead to some misunderstandings and actually exacerbate the problem. If your strategy begins with buying a document scanner or multi-function peripheral to start going paperless you might be in for a few surprises. Three things you must understand before getting started on a paperless initiative

• Buying a scanner or multi-function copier is like an onramp to the freeway, its only the beginning of the journey.
• Preparing documents to be scanned can be a monumental task. To often business owners look at how fast a scanner processes paper and make false labor predictions based on that alone.
• Properly identifying or indexing files using barcodes or database lookups will provide a more streamlined and consistent electronic filing process.

The typical process for clerical staff using scanning features is to scan paperwork individually to a local or network file folder, usually as PDF’s. Then attach the scanned images to records individually. Most of the software manufacturers that have incorporated scanning features have not thought through the process. The PDF files are rarely compressed, image quality is poor and the files are dumped into database tables.

It is understandable that this would occur. How many small or medium size businesses could afford to implement a true document imaging or document management system? Try rolling out FileNet, OpenText, SharePoint or Oracle IPM into a business with 5-100 employees. In order for this to be successful you will need to be prepared for the following high level requirements.

• Professional IT staff or vendor partner with a track record of success
• Systems integration to enable communication with existing business systems
• $60 – 150K Budget depending on scope of work

It seems like a perfect solution to just add a scanning button to the scheduling, billing, or patient records system. If your existing software system has a module why not use it right? So your business spends hundreds of man-hours tediously scanning transactions in the quest to become paperless. You are on your way to achieving the goals of saving space, eliminating lost or misfiled documents, and increasing your efficiency. Well, not quite.

After a few months or so you start to realize the databases don’t scale well and often become unstable. the neatly created folder structure you developed got accidentally copied over itself or files and folders were deleted by mistake. The scanning process to prepare, scan and index files is taking a lot longer than you expected. So what seemed to be a perfect solution really isn’t. It’s more problems.

Sooner or later your businesses will be faced with a need to migrate scanned files to a true document management repository. Post migration these records will need to be linked to the matching transactional data in the original software applications. Operational procedures will need to be altered; fortunately they will likely become way more efficient.

There are so many home brewed paperless office solutions today. Whether its using network shares, email folders, access databases, or completely custom-built applications. The biggest technical challenge in migrating these solutions is the proprietary data and/or file structures of each system. The biggest financial challenge is how to make the migration and new software solutions affordable.

Fortunately there are some great options today that can help you navigate and solve these challenges. Many small and medium size businesses can take advantage of cloud based storage repositories that are scalable, secure, and accessible using smart-phones and tablet computers. If you have an existing paperless system or process in place today or your considering buying a scanner give yourself the advantage of talking to one of our industry professionals today.

 Just a quick recap on the why we do it:

• Enforce best practices and procedures
• Accelerate process cycle times by automating repetitive tasks
• Change business rules and logic without requiring IT resources
• Ensure accurate data entry or document creation
• Manage and monitor personnel and operations performance

 I like to think of invoice management and workflow a bit like driving.  The rules of the road are well defined and everyone operates, the workflow that is, operates according to these rules.  Do you recall what it was like driving when the power goes off?  The street lights are out so, in general, it is much darker than normal.  The stop lights are also out, hopefully blinking red but not working as normal. You get to a big intersection with multiple turning lanes and it is just a bit confusing on whose turn it is.  Take this a bit further for those of you who have driven in a third world country and the confusion can go up ten-fold.  (Horns essentially replace brakes.  The biggest vehicle has the right of way.) 

 Without this established workflow, things don’t move as smoothly or as quickly.

 Ok, but will just any workflow do?  I say the answer is no.

 We have all seen or been conscripted to participate in those processes in invoice document management which just don’t make any sense.  They seem to take way too long, involve a plethora of paperwork and bureaucracy and at the end of the day may or may not even accomplish what it was that we needed done.  We walk away from our current invoice management activities thinking that there just has to be a better way.  (Remember the process and the paperwork associated with your mortgage?)

 Now would it make sense to automate a poor process into your new workflow?  Obviously not but all too often this is what occurs.  Taking a sub-par or bad process and implementing an automated workflow based on it will essentially just produce the same bad results and more of them.  You may ask why more bad results?  The reason is that by now enforcing the sub-par or bad process, the alternate paths that people had been using to actually get things done could now be closed forcing them back into the process they had been working around, resulting in more issues.    

 The point is to review any process that you are going to implement into your imaging and invoice workflow.   Eliminate the steps that were put in 10 years ago that make no sense today.  Review accounts payable workflow best practices to improve upon what you are currently doing.  Reject the idea “We’ve always done it that way” and embrace “If it ain’t broke, improve it.”  Make it ‘Better, Faster, Smarter’.

Something great happened a few months ago.  My garage flooded.  You may think I sound a bit crazy but it provided me the needed impetus to revisit my garage organization paradigm.  I took the opportunity to completely redo how everything was organized and I can honestly say I am much happier as a result.     

At the end of the day, we all have areas, such as invoice approval workflow, which need some process redesign and are currently causing us pain (i.e. my garage) and we know the benefits but we put it off.  Take the opportunity of setting up workflow to review and change things for the better.  At the end of the day we all want a solution which puts us more in control of our jobs, makes our lives easier and helps make our organization, our bosses and ourselves look good. 

This post was written by Robert Ripley who is Chief Operations Officer at iPayables with experience in IT Integration,  business process design and AP Automation with Fortune 500 companies at both Accenture and iPayables.  Learn more about iPayables at http://www.wordpress.ipayables.com   http://www.ipayables.com