How Capture Makes Your Business Better
In the previous post, we learned how Advanced Capture helps improve information visibility in applications such as digital mailrooms and shared service centers. Here we discuss how Advanced Capture helps you achieve operational excellence.
Achieve Operational Excellence – automation of processes to greatly reduce costs
While a digital mailroom works well in improving your information visibility, it’s the tip of the iceberg in delivering value using advanced capture. A major reason to automatically classify documents and extract data from those documents is to remove costs from the processes that use them. Achieving operational cost efficiencies includes both automating the business process wherever possible, and optimizing the human-centric elements that require judgment and decision making – providing the right information to the right person at the right time.
Invoice processing is a classic and still very relevant example of how advanced capture can help your AP department achieve operational excellence. Without advanced capture, the invoice must be manually keyed into your company’s ERP system for payment. This can take many minutes per invoice, and cost upwards of $20 per invoice from receipt to payment, resulting in costly operations, late payment penalties and loss of early payment discounts.
Advanced capture can automatically extract all invoice header, footer and line item data, compare to supplier databases and PO line items held in the ERP system, and output the results to the ERP system for payment—many times “straight through” without an operator ever touching the invoice. This processing of critical inbound documents can be achieved for ANY document (new account applications, claim forms, etc.) and extracted information automatically provided to ANY system or person.
University Hospitals has made a commitment to becoming a more efficient and accountable organization, and has used advanced capture toward that end. Administrators reasoned that process efficiency and productivity gains in the AP function would help the hospital system streamline procure-to-pay processes and concentrate more resources on patient care and professional development.
So University Hospitals implemented a Kofax solution that included automated invoice capture and data entry, as well as best practice AP work flows for resolving discrepancies, a self-service supplier portal, and an AP process optimization dashboard. The solution provides real-time integration with Oracle software, including the hospital’s ERP system.
The results? $1.2 million in staff productivity gains; a reduction in invoice approval cycle times from 30 days to 5 days; 99.2% of invoice processes automated; and $265,000 of savings from capturing more early-payment discounts. Advanced capture in the form of automated invoice extraction played a central role in helping University Hospitals achieve these incredible results for their AP processes.
Another customer, a large North American insurance company, was hamstrung by manual, time-consuming, expensive processing of claims applications by their agents. The company sought a solution that would automate and accelerate the processing of claims submitted by claim agents, especially during high-volume situations (e.g., natural disasters).
This customer implemented advanced capture for importing and pre-processing email and SMS messages from customers. Incoming messages are automatically validated against claim numbers, then routed accordingly. The system provides a mission-critical, real-time, solution that can be easily translated to other groups within the company as needed.
Whereas advanced capture was once considered solely a batch-oriented, IT back office function, it is now an integral part of ensuring your First Mile business processes run efficiently. This type of advanced capture is more transactional in nature and represents the new wave of capture technologies that focus on quickly receiving a single document/email/SMS, performing data extraction, and returning the results – without the overhead of waiting for the rest of the batch to complete. Your processes must keep up with the speed of the customer, and transactional-oriented capture delivers that responsiveness.
Stay tuned for the next post, how advanced capture increases customer engagement.
Source: http://services.kofax.com/blog/index.php/how-capture-makes-your-business-better/