Fax Machine Scrappage Scheme
Introducing the Fax Machine Scrappage Scheme, where we refresh your obsolete technology and bring you back up to date!
How it works: We take your fax machine from the dark & dusty corner of your office and give you £100 off a shiny new Canon ScanFront 300! Find out more...
Take this opportunity to leave behind the old fashioned way of doing things and enter the efficient world of the paper-less office.
This fantastic Canon network scanner we are offering you has a touch screen computer inside of it, meaning that all you need to do is plug it into your network and start scanning. It enables you to scan directly to the email addresses of suppliers and customers and to internal shared folders for colleagues to download.
If you're worried about losing the ability to send faxes to those who still have a fax machine, the problem has been addressed by allowing you to fax straight from the scanner!
Find out more about the offer here.
Here's a little bit about the Canon ScanFront 300 network scanner:
- Scan directly to email
- Scan to shared folders
- Scan to FTP & USB
- Even scan to fax!
- Plug straight into the network - no PC needed!
How About a Freebie? Courtesy of C2S
Although it may have seemed to have gone all quiet here, I can assure you...it hasn't!
We have been working really, really, doubly-really, extra-really, doubly-extra-really hard in the background doing...well, what we do best! (Which, if you're wondering, is 'making people happy through the services that we provide'.)
So, what exactly have we been doing? Well, that's what I'm hoping to show you now:
As I learnt from my days at school, ICT or IT or 'Information Technology...' or 'tech..' or 'techy, complicated stuff...' or 'boxes that scare old people...' is all about providing a solution (usually) to a customer or someone who has a problem, which can all be fixed by a computer doing something on its own. This is exactly what we have been doing - providing a 'tech' based solution to people (maybe like you). And one of solutions is quite regularly as simple as comparing two files that have as much in common as David Walliams and Lara Stone (that blond thing that is always around him these days). Usually, as "that bloke who talks to computers in that language he calls 'see sharp' which looks like what Darleks would write in if they could write...", it is down to me to try and concoct some ingenious solution.
The first issue we come up against in comparing two files is that we actually need something to compare. So, lets hypothesise for a moment: we have two database-driven systems, ABBYY and FileDirector. ABBYY is our batch OCR software and FileDirector is our Document Management System. Now, we have just scanned all of our invoices for this month and ABBYY has done its clever thing and read the invoices, gathered all of the index data and is pushing all the images and data into FileDirector but...oh damn!..Typical!..As per usual, IT upstairs have been fiddling with the servers and have just broken everything. I'll tell you what, I'll have go at them and then call my heroes at C2S and they'll know exactly how to fix this.
OK, so here at C2S HQ we have very rapidly responded and fixed the problem that IT caused but we have discovered that not all of the documents successfully imported into FileDirector. Problem? Never! I'll just export a CSV file from ABBYY and another one from FileDirector that'll tell me whats missing. So, I have my CSV files but some of them have some blank rows where documents were half way through importing or there are some rows with just one column value that is used as a sub-header. Hmm...that's never going to compare. Ah! Now I remember, I'll use George's amazing 'stripper' tool...AKA 'CSV Blank Line Remover' that will beast through the CSV files in seconds and remove all of those useless lines that will just cause the comparison to crash.
So, finally, with great pleasure, I, George of C2S, introduces to you FOR FREE The 'CSV Blank Line Remover'!
Just a little freebie from us at C2S to help you with your daily tasks. In a world where nothing is free we are actually giving you something for free, that's how nice we are!
It's a simple command line application, with a simple installer, which allows you remove blank rows from a CSV file. It also has the functionality to remove rows with content in 'some' of the columns. See, I really do like doing all the work for you! All you have to do is tell it the minimum number of columns that have to be empty before the whole row is deleted and the tool will get to work! As my well known long lost cousin's cousin would say..."simples!".
You can download the Windows installer for this amazing tool here:
Changing the ROI on Automated Invoice Processing
I regularly ask myself the question, "exactly how much does it cost a business to process an invoice?". Every time I go out and look through the research that is out there I always get the same answer: it could be anywhere from £5 per invoice through to £50, and maybe a bit more. To some extent there's a lot of fluidity in the answers because one company's concept of processing an invoice could be keying the information into the finance package, whilst another's could entail the full payment process including workflow, sign off and flexibility to enable suppliers to phone and chase invoice statuses.
This always leads to an interesting debate when I speak with potential customers about their requirements, about how automating the process can impact on their business. The simple answer is that every business is different and trying to label a cost for processing an invoice without really getting under the hood of how much is being processed and the workflows that go hand in hand with that is pretty much impossible. However, things have become slightly different recently with the pricing model Ephesoft are bringing to the market, using an Open Source business model and making the software available on an annual subscription basis means that there is a fixed entry point for most businesses.
A fixed point, based on an annual subscription as a point of entry, for an invoice processing solution makes things slightly different. There is no need to factor in CAPEX because everything comes from an OPEX budget. This, for instance, means that the process of deciding whether to use the software or not can simply come down to the following questions: Do I need to employ another member of staff to help with invoice processing? Or, can I reduce the staffing overhead within my finance function? To put this into perspective, I would say that the annual subscription for Ephesoft is roughly the same as a company would spend on a part time member of the finance team. I'm pretty sure that you can't, however, get a part-time member of staff to process in excess of 2 million invoices in a year!
Whilst this type of thinking makes the uptake of this type of solution more attractive to businesses than a traditional and proprietary license based solution, I don't necessarily think that this is a method that will get a business its maximum return on investment. I appreciate that staff members are the single most expensive cost to a business and that wherever possible business processes need to be 'human-less' in order to minimise mistakes and drive efficiency, so take a look at the additional benefits that come from deploying this type of solution. The main one will be the time it takes to sign off an invoice for payment.
With a paper-based process you could be looking at 20-30 days for the paper to be passed from person to person to gain sign off before payment is approved. However, with an electronic process it could be reduced to a 10-15 day turnaround. This depends on your specific business rules, which could make the process even quicker, but paying suppliers early does nothing to make you more profitable! This is unless you are able to negotiate early payment terms with them. Now there's a good use of time for the finance team, rather than keying and chasing invoices around a business! Why not have them working on additional discounts from suppliers for early payments. This directly increases your profits, cost of sales will reduce and you can become even more competitive in a very tough current environment.
Automating the process of paying an invoice isn't just about saving time and money on the input of data from supplier invoices, it's also about making better use of the 'intelligent' resources you have in your business (i.e. the humans). After all, if you are spending £100,000 per month with a particular supplier and can negotiate an additional 2% discount for paying early that will help pay for an Ephesoft solution. Now think about doing that with all of your suppliers!
What is CMIS?
There are many Electronic Document & Record Management systems out there and it's probably fair to say that the majority don't have a bulk scanning front-end to them. Certainly if they do, its not the core focus of the product so it can be 'flakey' to say the least. This is one of the reasons why products like Kofax Capture and Input Accel have excelled in the marketplace, their ability to 'front end' the process of changing physical documents to electronic is very good. This, however, has often come at a cost; release scripts are customised for each client and are different no matter which EDRM system you choose to adopt.
Whilst, as a salesman, I love the idea that a customer can part with a small fortune to customise their capture, and from then on they are tied in to me as a customer because we have written some proprietary code, the businessman in me says there has got to be a better way. I don't like proprietary and I don't like being tied to a single manufacturer for business processing, which is probably why I've enjoyed getting under the hood of a number of Open Source technologies. One phrase that I came across very early in my research was Content Management Interoperability Services or CMIS, which – to me as a specialist in the capture of documents – was very interesting.
CMIS is an open standard. The concept behind it is very simple and driven by the fact that most EDRM and ECM installations are at departmental level, so the solutions are purchased on an 'as required' basis. This has left behind a legacy of islands of data and documents which could be used by the whole enterprise but are in actual fact only accessible by individual departments. Making these individual systems talk to one another is very hard and very costly, but as time goes and technology evolves the corporate requirement is beginning to vastly outweigh the individual needs of users. As a standard, the ultimate aim of CMIS is to simplify this process of integration or interoperability. This massively reduces the costs and effort involved.
So why was I so taken by CMIS? Well, as a first step, it makes a proprietary system like Documentum or Open Text a little less proprietary. But for me, being focused on the capture side of things, it makes integration with repositories from a single point of capture much easier. It means that we don't need to write custom integrations with a number of EDRMS solutions and we can image enable current repositories, even if clients have a different one for each department with the same method of capture. This, to me, makes an awful lot of sense and relieves a large amount of pain and management from the IT department, certainly when you consider that capture is just a small part of the overall solution.
Who's signed up for CMIS? Well here's a list of some of the EDRM solutions that are CMIS compliant:
Alfresco
EMC Documentum
Fabasoft
IBM FileNet
HP Autonomy Interwoven
Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010
OpenText
As for the Document Scanning/Document Capture, as far as I know, the only company that has picked up this banner is Ephesoft. Whilst, at this point in time I think that CMIS is at a very early stage in terms of adoption and impact in the decision making process, I think in the long run it can have a big impact.
Conceptually, my ability to go to a client and say "...your knowledge workers are using Sharepoint, HR are using Documentum and Accounts are using FileNet but that actually doesn't matter too much to me as they are all CMIS compliant – I can use a single capture platform for all without writing complex release scripts..." is a pretty powerful idea and one not to be overlooked.
The Electronic Mailroom (Part 3)
Here's the final part of my blog on the Electronic Mailroom.
So far we've been using the analogy of 'dirty washing' to highlight our process and bring it to a much simpler level of understanding for everybody.
In Part 2 of the blog we sorted the washing and washed it. In business terms, we worked out what the documents were and then extracted data. There are still two stages left for the washing: it needs to be ironed
and put somewhere ready for use.
The Ironing
We've completed the washing, it's all dry and the next step is to iron the clothes (after all, you wouldn't go out in clothes that were covered in creases!). What we are doing here, hidden away in the corner of our software solution, is verifying our data (ironing out the bits we don't want to be there). The documents are taken to other applications and databases and are checked to ensure what we have is correct. Making sure, for instance, that a customer reference number is already in our CRM system or a PO Number is allocated in the accounting package.
There is a lot of complexity under the hood here and, from a user's point of view, you should be assured that the right system will gather all the relevant information from line of business apps and databases without any human intervention. Meanwhile, we should remember that the dirt that was extracted is still sat in the machine and linked (invisibly) to the item of clothing it came from.
Putting The Washing Away
We're now ready to put the washing away in the right places, well, for the physical items/documents that invariably is a cupboard or chest of drawers. Think of these as databases. You're better off having on large cupboard to store all of your clothes rather than a number of different places. It just makes things easier to manage.
All of our documents now wind up in their rightful places, but how do users get at them? That's where the dirt comes in: the dirt (extracted data) is used to cross reference line of business applications, databases and which drawer (document type) it came from. Essentially, the data is used by users to start internal business processes and to manage their archives.
Well, there you go, that's a very high level, very simplistic overview of the Electronic Mailroom. This technology is here now. There are so many benefits to this type of solution and with the basis of understanding you have learnt from these posts you are now on the right path towards getting the most out of the Electronic Mailroom. It's a lot more than just capturing a document as it comes into a business, there's a whole load of intelligence there behind the scenes.
Click2Scan Limited have been working in this sophisticated niche of the document management marketplace for some time now and our expertise is utilised by businesses from all walks of life, including charities, manufacturers and universities.