DOCUMENT Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 34) A I ARCHIVING & IMAGING & t oday, a centralized model of capture is no longer the norm in an ever-growing globalized world of business. Therefore, enterprises must look toward intelligent and effective distributed capture processes to ensure all locations are on the right page. Distribute Capture Success t Managing the enterprise’s distributed information capture processes By Bernard Chester Standards must address not only issues such as image quality but also content. Organizations need certain information to properly execute their processes, and you need to demand that it is supplied. Finally, your standards should apply to outsiders, not just internal staff. No matter how much one hates to offend business associates and customers, you need to be specific about what you will and will not accept and how things should be delivered to your organization. Let me illustrate how this works for a health insurer’s claims process. The insurer publishes rules for how claims should be prepared and publishes them in a number of ways to providers. Medical claims are required to arrive on the federally mandated forms or in the industry-agreed X12 transaction. Certain values must be supplied and discretionary values coded according to the manual. Claims missing crucial information are denied out of hand. The paper capture system also has rules: only accepts red forms and they get digitized at a specific density that permits quality OCR. Facsimile transmissions must be sent with specific options to an electronic fax system that won’t allow different settings. And the web interface does not permit a claim to be completed without the required information as well. >> Design systems to avoid problems, and reward good behavior: Within the framework of defined processes and standards, there can be other ways that capture is distributed. In today’s decentralized and geographically spread world, a specific capture process may be distributed across the state, the nation or the world. The middlemen are being eliminated and services moved to the lowest cost/ best quality location. The goal is always to cut transaction times and costs, permitting the organization to remain competitive in the global economy. The result: staff or clients that don’t report to you but on whom you depend to make your systems succeed. There is a loss of control, often as a trade-off for other business benefits. You may Throughout your organization, workers are receiving in-coming transactional documents at a number of locations and in a variety of formats. So, how do you manage this distributed and multitechnology flow and reliably capture key information and the base document itself? How do we guarantee that the business can apply these technologies and be successful? Let’s take a moment to appreciate all of the different patterns that distributed information capture may follow. You might assign each stage in the capture process to a different geographical or organizational unit. Or you might distribute a single stage to multiple locations or employees. Finally, you might provide multiple information capture technologies for the same transaction. No matter which pattern you choose, the management objectives remain the same: improve quality, minimize processing time and reduce cost. To meet those objectives, system performance needs to be monitored and problems quickly diagnosed and corrected. Guiding Your Capture Solution >> Establish standards: The first step in managing distributed capture is to establish standards that cover each combination of medium and capture process. Without establishing these performance guidelines, you fail to give guidance to those involved and, therefore, can’t object to substandard results. For digitizing paper forms, standards would include scanning density, image quality and indexing accuracy. For electronic transactions, the structure must conform (typically) to the industry standard. Data entry keystroke counts and error rates allow comparative evaluation of staff. 34 document june.08 www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.