Document Capture - An Essential Part of any Paperless Solution

Document Capture - An Essential part of any solution

I have been selling, installing, and implementing document management solutions for over 28 years. Technology has come a long way.

How do you determine your capture needs?

My definition of document capture is that it is an application that can take in a physical document or an electronic document and process the image and data in the way that an organization needs.

The most straightforward process would be scanning the document, saving it in PDF, TIF, or another format to a designated directory. There should be a naming convention set up at the bare minimum so that there is some meaning to the filename, i.e., 123456.pdf, with 123456 being an invoice number or client number.

If you are using a document management or a records management solution, you will get into document types, metadata values, and OCR (optical character recognition). OCR provides full-text search capability so that you can search by words in the documents.

Most document management solutions have a scanning option. It may be part of the base license or an extra license fee.

It should include, at a minimum, OCR. Some advanced solutions include ICR (Intelligent character recognition), barcode recognition, document classification, and scripting capabilities.

Usually, the capture solution integrates with the document management solution. For example, Fujitsu scanners ship with their application PaperstreamIP, Epson scanners ship with Document Capture Pro, and other scanners include Kofax Elite.

It is vital that you document your user needs from a capture standpoint. In my opinion, this is one of the essential parts of the solution.

The other piece is who needs to use the documents. For example, if you want them for retrieval and in a repository, using the application offered by your document management solution will most likely give you what you need.

Why consider a standalone Capture Solution?

However, if you want the documents for retrieval but also need to send them to other departments or third parties that do not use the document repository, that is a different story.

In this case, I recommend you look at an advanced capture solution sold separately and by a different vendor than your document management solution. The benefits of this are:

1. Your input is not dependent on the document management solution. So, for example, your document management solution could be down, but your input production is not affected. The documents you produce will get sent over to the document management solution once it is back up.
2. You can set up multiple exports of the same document. For example, you can send PDFs to the document management solution and TIFs to another application or third party.
3. If you decide to choose another document management solution down the road, most likely, your advanced capture solution will work seamlessly with it as well.
4. You aren't tied to one vendor and have more flexibility and usability

I hope some of this helps.

I have probably scanned and processed more documents over my 28 years than any other salesperson. I am glad to give my expertise and recommendations.

Debby Kruzic
President - Records and Data Management, Inc.
Founder - Teckedin.com and Teckedinmarketplace.com