Document capture and routing streamlines business processes

With companies looking to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and become greener, are paper documents finally heading toward their long-predicted obsolescence? Most likely not, but document capture and routing technologies can provide many of the desired effects.

Contrary to some projections, paper documents are not going away. Rather, a new generation of technologies -- centering on document capture and routing -- is steadily emerging to enable organizations to dramatically reduce their use of paper while increasing productivity, accelerating business processes, improving compliance with regulatory requirements, and strengthening both disaster recovery and "green" business initiatives.

Document capture and routing is an efficient, flexible way to capture, transform and move paper and electronic documents among a variety of people, places and formats. It starts with the familiar, simple and ubiquitous networked multifunction peripheral (MFP) -- the new-breed copy machine -- and provides "any-to-many" means of scanning and distributing electronic versions of paper documents to multiple destinations in multiple formats.

For example, at the simplest level, a knowledge worker can take a signed contract to an MFP and scan it to create a digital version. A document handling application can then convert the scan into a Microsoft Word document or text-searchable Adobe PDF file, and e-mail the file to the worker's preferred destination (such as a network folder, e-mail in-box or fax number).

The power of document capture and routing becomes more apparent when a team of people are working on a specific client or project. All content related to that matter can be captured by the MFP, collected and consolidated into a single, central and secure document management system that enables distributed teams to share information and collaborate. That eliminates the need to make multiple copies (with the associated security risks), reduces courier and shipping costs, cuts the use of printer consumables such as ink or toner, and increases information accessibility throughout the organization.

Key elements

For enterprises considering document capture or scanning, the MFP is the core capture device because these new copier-class and printer-class MFPs have the right mix of feature-rich sophistication, usability and cost-effectiveness to support broad deployment.

The MFPs must be supported by a software-based infrastructure to enable post-capture document processing. This software centrally controls and manages the document conversion, compression, routing, auditing and more. This layer acts as a "many-to-many" hub, supporting n devices and n destinations.

Destinations are the recipients of a document,whether that is a network printer or folder, e-mail, fax or a more sophisticated document/content management system.

Every user in the company should be able to select simple scan settings, convert file formats or perform optical character recognition (OCR) and route the scanned output to their own e-mail address or a fax number. Those user instructions -- sometimes called "routing rules" -- can be defined, saved and executed using a routing sheet (like a fax cover sheet) or directly entered on a display panel at the MFP.