DOCUMENT Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 35) find this stressful, but the business forces of today are pushing enterprises toward instant response and “high touch” experiences. So, it is important to engineer internal processes so that problems don’t occur. For example, a national manufacturer uses franchisees to sell and deliver its products. In the past, customers would order through their local representative who would then send in the order to headquarters, where it would be keyed into the ERP. When ready, the order would be shipped to the franchise, which would deliver supplies and install any equipment. When the order was accepted, the franchise would notify headquarters, which would then send out an invoice to the customer. When payment was received, the franchise’s account would be credited and the balance (profit) issued as a check to the agent. The process was slow, prone to errors and created a disconnect between ordering, invoicing and service delivery that often resulted in apologies and corrected orders and invoices. Today, that’s not how business is done in the Internet age, so they re-engineered the process. Orders are now entered by customers or agents into a website, which enforces business rules, feeds the ERP and gives an instant copy. The ERP responds to the representative with an order confirmation that has price, taxes and estimated shipping costs, as well as an estimated ship date. Orders can be tracked online by both the franchise and customer; when it ships, an email is sent to the agent so that he or she can schedule staff and arrange delivery with the client. The agent prints the work order locally and gets signature approval on it when all tasks are completed. Daily, a stack of completed work orders are scanned as a single file and downloaded to headquarters. The work orders are processed within minutes; the barcoded invoice number at the top permits the file to be split into individual invoices and indexed without human intervention. Their arrival initiates the invoicing process. >> Unify alternative information sources: Often, you must support alternative input schemes. If each of your capture solutions is implemented as an independent solution, it is necessary to make sure that the rules are identical. Any process change requires modifications to all of the solutions. Thus, the trick must be to minimize the unique components and unify the process. For example, a university accepts admissions over the counter, by post, by fax and using the web interface. Initially, each media was handled using its own process. However, they redesigned their solutions so that the postal and counter submissions are scanned on receipt and faxes are fed electronically into the same scanning system. A single OCR application reads the data from the images and goes through the same indexing process. The same rules engine reviews the resulting captured data that checks web input as it is entered. The subsequent application data, which is delivery-source independent, is imported into the Higher Education MIS, which initiates follow-on activities, such as transcript requests and acceptance letters. The impact of admission policy changes is minimized; changes need only to be implemented once and are more easily validated. >> Desktops are bad: All IT operations staffs know how difficult it is to maintain desktop PCs. Life becomes a continuous process of evaluating application conflicts and distributing upgrades and new packages. Any way you can move functionality to servers and away from individual stations makes it easier to ensure that everyone is using the latest version. Similarly, the more you can design your capture system to use web-based services or remote terminal access, the easier it will be to maintain. It can also lower system costs and enable productivity increases. To illustrate this point, a state government agency was convinced by a management consulting report to pursue a “virtual office” strategy. To achieve this, they needed to eliminate paper handling and provide secure information access for workers who might be located anywhere in the state. Incoming mail requests are scanned at headquarters and stored in a document management system based upon the document type. Remote workers are equipped with terminal appliances ($100 each) that connect to headquarters via secure VPN. The appliances have no local disk drive, printer or removable media, preserving information security. They use terminal services to review documents, add index information and access proprietary systems. The performance improvement for each staffer has been 20%, plus they have additional gains from eliminating office and file storage space. Management can monitor individual activity through communication system activity logs as well as documents accessed and transactions performed. >> Distribute functions where they are best performed: Distributed capture www.DOCUMENTmedia.com june.08 document 35 http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com
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