By Thaddeus Bouchard

In virtually every corner of every major industry, it’s hard to envision a future without paper. Whether it’s contracts, documentation, correspondence, invoices, agreements, or other documents, paper remains a dominant medium for business communication. Nonetheless, companies of every size are continually searching for new and smarter ways to manage that flood of paper. That’s because the process of creating, sharing, editing, printing and copying documents creates increasingly unacceptable costs – from the direct costs of paper and ink/toner supplies and the lost man-hours of wasted productivity to the overhead associated with paper-based processes and storing paper archives.

The Value of Streamlined Document Capture and Routing For Users – The ability to quickly and easily capture, convert, and distribute paper and electronic documents, creating efficient document workflows. For SMBs – A document capture and routing solution can serve as a vital building block to create a foundation for standardized policies and procedures to distribute documents within the organization – productively and in compliance with regulations. For the Environment - Businesses can slash their eco-footprint by reducing paper and ink/toner consumption, reducing fossil-fuel-consumption from couriers and shippers, and decreasing space consumption in landfills.

What’s more, the "social cost of paper" – the rapidly emerging requirement for companies to curb their paper consumption and reduce their "green footprint" – is a growing concern as well. Today, stakeholders at every level – from shareholders to customers to employees – are eager to find ways to reduce paper waste and ink consumption, lower energy usage, and improve their overall environmental posture.

Fortunately, addressing these concerns can translate not only into "green benefits" but also smarter and more efficient business processes. In particular, small businesses are recognizing that document capture and routing solutions can serve as the necessary building blocks to create this ideal foundation. Streamlining the document lifecycle creates a positive bottom line effect that aligns smarter environmental practices with a wide range of common, labor-intensive workflows to improve business processes and lower costs.

Support Green Initiatives
In most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), documents come and go across a wide variety of media in a wide variety of formats – everything from faxes and e-mails to document scans, network printing, postal correspondence, e-filing, archiving, and more. Document capture and routing solutions bring a new, efficient, and flexible way to capture, transform, and move those documents to and from multiple people, places, and formats. That’s a powerful concept for small and medium-sized businesses because it opens them up to a world of sophisticated – yet pragmatic and affordable - workflows that were previously only within reach of larger enterprises. These workflows can tie in various steps to increase efficiency, including:

• Faxing
• emailing
• Scanning to a network folder
• Network printing
• e-Filing to a choice of locations, including systems for document management, records management, litigation support, and archiving

It all starts with the familiar, simple, and ubiquitous networked multi-function peripheral (MFP) – the new-breed copy machine. These do not have to be massive, expensive machines – a basic MFP for a small business can cost as little as $300 from major hardware vendors and their resellers. Document capture and routing solutions utilize the intuitive MFP scan feature to provide "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 contract administrator or sales manager can take a signed paper contract to the MFP and put it into the document feeder. Instead of merely copying that contract, that MFP scans the contract into a digital version of the document. The document capture and routing application converts that scan into a Microsoft® Word document or text-searchable Adobe® PDF file. Then, it delivers the file electronically back to the user’s chosen destination. That could be a shared network folder, an e-mail inbox, or even a fax number.

The power of document capture and routing becomes even greater when a team of people are collaborating on a single or project or client matter. All related content 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 easily.

From an environmental perspective, the benefits are significant. There’s no need to make multiple copies, reducing paper consumption. Teams can cut their use of printer consumables such as ink or toner. And there’s no need for couriers and shipping companies to deliver copies to remote team members (reducing fossil-fuel consumption).

Just as important, these greener processes are smarter processes. Companies can improve the accessibility of information – providing 24/7 access from almost anywhere to any authorized user. That means faster workflows and more efficient business processes. Document security increases because paper copies are not floating around in the hands of multiple people. And, of course, all of the associated costs are lower as well.

Functions Users Need
Users from every role and level in the company need access to fundamental, consistent MFP features that are managed, supported, available, reliable, and understandable. For example, every user – from administrator to executive – should be able to select simple scan settings, convert file formats, use optical character recognition (OCR), and route scanned documents to their own e-mail address or to a fax number. Those "routing rules" can be defined, saved, and executed directly from the MFP’s display panel or using a routing sheet (like a fax cover sheet).

However, there are other "power" users, specific departments, and special groups who require a higher level of functionality and sophisticated features to support their specific workflows. These could include integrating document capture with enterprise information systems (such as ERP, ECM, or other business applications), archiving, audit logging, cost recovery, e-forms, barcodes, electronic signatures, and more. MFPs and document capture and handling software can deliver that sophistication today – even for SMBs.

The Technical Foundation for Document Capture and Routing
SMBs can leverage a document capture and routing solution to streamline how they operate and transact business. From a technical perspective, it lets companies:

• Combine paper and electronic-based information to create "mixed-mode" documents.
• Connect to any networked scanner, scan-enabled digital printer, copier, fax, or MFP.
• Create personal and public document routing rules that may be saved for reuse and are fully accessible from any "smart" MFP.
• Convert files and images to PDF, text-searchable PDF, TIFF, RTF, JPEG, DOC, and TXT files used for document workflows and e-filing processes.
• Compress documents up to 80 percent of original file size — reducing bandwidth and storage requirements.
• Communicate information to various destinations and recipients simultaneously such as "send to" desktop, fax, email, network folder and printers and/or "save to" document repositories, document management systems (DMS), records management systems (RMS), enterprise content management (ECM) systems, and litigation support systems — even handheld devices.
• Consistently use an intuitive desktop interface that directly leverages existing applications by using native interfaces.
• Comply with corporate record retention policies and document archive requirements with comprehensive tracking and document archiving functionality.

By converting paper documents into text-searchable electronic files, document capture and routing solutions increase information accessibility. Worker productivity increases because they can quickly search and locate documents. It also reduces the likelihood of lost, misplaced, or misdirected files, and also saves real-estate costs required for file storage. A document capture and routing solution even provides disaster recovery protection and business continuity in the event paper (which is extremely volatile) is destroyed. The ability to efficiently and effectively handle large volumes of documents mandates a set of key requirements:

• Manageability – SMBs don’t have the resources or desire to manage overly complicated solutions. A document capture and routing solution must provide centralized management while enabling decentralized document scanning. That means supporting unattended, low-maintenance operations.
• Reliability – There’s no tolerance for an application failure that could leave employees unable to print, fax, or scan documents. There should be built-in failover so if the primary system (in the cluster) fails, a secondary server takes over.
• Scalability – The right solution lets you simply plug in other nodes to increase throughput and capacity – without penalty. Virtual machines (VMs) are also increasingly popular for their ability to bring efficiency, cost-control, and on-demand scalability.
• Security – From a technical and user perspective, an audit trail lets the organization track who did what, when, where, and with what documents. Best practices such as encryption, firewalls, and other security measures are essential elements of enterprise document management as well.
• Flexibility – The application/platform should be flexible and customizable to support unique environments, now and in the future.
• Cost-Effectiveness – A less-managed, less-reliable system is inevitably more expensive. A system that provides a reasonable ROI is achievable with properly designed and priced document capture and handling solutions today.
• Control – By requiring authentication at the MFP, companies can role-restrict access to features and personalize the user experience. For instance, Joe can use color-copying or color-printing features and send long-distance faxes but Bob can’t. This also permits chargeback cost recovery. A company might permit certain users to scan to their own e-mail address. Others might be allowed to scan into Microsoft SharePoint® or EMC Documentum® or scan to multiple distributions and destinations.

The Payoff for Business
For SMBs that embrace a document capture and routing solution, the payoffs are considerable. First and foremost, business processes are faster and less expensive as worker productivity increases. Documents and the information they contain are accessible throughout the company. There’s an enhanced ability to comply with security and privacy frameworks. And there’s a greater ability to reduce the consumption of paper, toner/ink, and floor space by moving documents to electronic systems. By embracing green motives, businesses achieve solid ROI and increased efficiency. BTE

Thaddeus Bouchard is Chief Technology Officer Omtool, Ltd. (www.omtool.com). A 20-year veteran of the software and hardware industry, Bouchard is responsible for directing all aspects of technology, business-process improvement, and system development. Omtool is a provider of document and information handling solutions that control the document lifecycle.