Guest written by: David Whitton, General Manager of Kodak Alaris – Eastern Cluster (Middle East, Africa, East Europe, Turkey & Russia)
The great work your teams are putting out is what will help move your business forward. If you’re part of a growing company, that acceleration can be exciting: new customers, new projects and a brighter future. The downside is that growth often brings complexity.
Today we create more information than ever before. In fact, current estimates predict that by 2020, 1.7 MB of new data will be created every second for every person in the world. A variety of businesses will be negatively impacted by the Era of Data Chaos. The key to harnessing the power of data is to simplify systems, so it’s easy to extract the key information out of the noise and make better business decisions.
In a mobile and geographically dispersed world, work happens everywhere. Information needs to be entered into systems on the go and accessed at point of need without compromise. This is where web-based capture solutions can help. Here’s how:
Start by getting paper out of the process
Despite the widespread interest in digital technology, much of business is still conducted on paper. More than that, 46% of businesses see the removal of paper processes as the single greatest opportunity for improvement of productivity. Relying on paper for your business processes means you’re facing a lot of manual intervention. Hands are touching (and re-touching) documents in order to pass them to the right people, key information into digital systems and file them away for archival purposes.
When you catch those documents at the start of a process and convert them to digital, especially in high-touch customer-facing scenarios such as on-boarding, you can automate low-value, labour intensive activities. That puts your team’s hands to more important work.
Many companies start their digital transformation by scanning documents and filing them away in digital archives. For some business requirements, that’s what’s needed. But to really unlock the power of your data, look to capture solutions that automatically extract critical information and connect to your business processes. Business data is instantly available where it’s needed, to help make decisions to grow your bottom-line and boost your market competitiveness.
Next, consolidate inputs
In a perfect world, no process would ever have exceptions. Every invoice would be submitted electronically. All new client applications would be submitted through one common web-form. We know that’s not the case. We live in a multi-channel world, where our people and our customers communicate to us in lots of ways, and send us documents in lots of formats.
This is where a business could quickly get lost in data chaos. When documents enter a process in different formats and through different channels it’s tempting to either handle them as exceptions to a legacy process or in discrete silos. It’s more effective – and more impactful to your business agility – to integrate data from multiple sources upfront into a single business process.
A case: give mobile workers time back with web-based capture.
People who are responsible for big picture objectives and client relationships are short on time. Meetings and travel cut heavily into their schedules. And they can’t afford to lose time to legacy processes that delay progress.
The more a mobile worker can reduce mental space dedicated to overhead tasks, the better for the entire organization.
Web-based capture enables mobile workers to snap photos of receipts on the road, and rely on the document management system to deal with them. The receipts are now in the right hands, and they can free themselves up to focus on what really matters.
Finally, centralize control and enable remote locations
One of the most compelling reasons for implementing web-based capture is to lighten your IT department’s load. Web-based capture allows:
- Scalability: web-based capture solutions live in the cloud, so they don’t require the commitment (or investment) that comes with an on-premise solution. Scaling up or scaling down in number of users and other licensing factors is much simpler with this model.
- Remote Administration: IT support staff don’t need to install software locally or train users for each new process. Using a web-based tool means that drivers and applications can be deployed centrally in a fraction of the time.
The result? Flexibility and speed for faster results
The benefits to web-based capture for distributed teams and mobile workers are clear: improved customer experience and internal efficiency. Getting started with web-based capture is not difficult. Solutions like this can be set up and securely deployed wherever an Internet connection exists.
Web-based capture has established itself as a game-changer for increased revenue and for survival. Considering the clear connection to growth, what is stopping today’s leaders from investing in tomorrow’s technology?
