Transactional content management

Several independent developments – fail-safe scanning technology; Check 21 legislation; and intelligent document recognition technology – are converging to give rise to the next big thing in transactional processing: automation. It begins with what is known as capture – a more descriptive term used to describe document imaging – and goes on to employ business process and enterprise content management strategies which are operating at the heart of competitive companies in every industry today.

Information capture: the first step

Optical character recognition and intelligent document classification are now more than simply a means to reduce file cabinet space and shipping costs for document archival – they have become front-line, mission-critical components of advanced business solutions that are driving revenue for global enterprises in every vertical market.

Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s retail lock-box operations, where large production-level scanners from makers such as IBML and Opex scan thousands upon thousands of check and payment coupon images per day. Retail remittance transactions will test the throughput of even the most robust hardware, but these powerful machines can not only scan the MICR lines and CAR/LAR amounts of checks passing through the track at the highest rated speeds, they can actually open the mail too. And so, true automation has in fact already made its appearance in the transactional world. But this is only the beginning.

As scanning hardware technologies have evolved, so too have the software components that add intelligence to the process. In addition to image enhancement and clean-up features, today’s enterprise capture solutions boast not only the highest possible OCR accuracy rates, but a number of advanced extraction, validation and classification capabilities as well that help to facilitate check processing.

With the most advanced solutions on the market, intelligent document capture involves five essential steps: capture, classify, extract, validate and deliver.

Capture. Checks and remittance documents are captured using a scanner, fax or multi-functional peripheral (MFP). Electronic data-streams such as EDI and XML can also be ingested with equal ease.

Classify. Documents are classified by a variety of sophisticated recognition engines using image based and text based analysis based OCR, and an assortment of knowledge-based techniques to identify what document and transaction they represent.

Extract. Data extraction begins using OCR and ICR zonal and free-form extraction, not only to extract data from the document itself, but also to collect meta-data – point of origination, date and time stamp, etc.

Validate. Incoming data can be validated against existing data contained in customer databases and business applications, ensuring only the most accurate information makes it into downstream applications.

Deliver. Data can be delivered to content repositories, and stored on a tiered storage platform designed to keep frequently accessed data immediately available and infrequently accessed data stored affordably.

Check and list

The typical lock-box service operates through a ‘check-and-stub’ model, meaning that each incoming envelope contains one check with one payment stub that corresponds to it. This process has been streamlined, however they don’t support for wholesale remittance, or ‘check-and-list’ type processing, where one check can be accompanied by a multi-page remittance document representing numerous transactions, all with varying degrees of value.

The complexity of managing wholesale remittance makes it an expensive process; meaning accounts receivable can become a cost- rather than value-center. This is where businesses realize revenue, and having quick and simplified access to operational cash is critical to the health of the company. Though volumes are lower, the value of checks processed between businesses is higher than in a retail environment, meaning each transaction requires greater scrutiny and higher thresholds for accuracy –a check for $100 ought to be handled differently than a check for $1,000,000. This is where transactional content management solutions become extremely important.

It takes true intelligence to automate the wholesale remittance process which must contend at times with one check that represents many – sometimes even thousands – of transactions. Associating these line item payments with the goods or services they represent requires not only extraction and validation, but also a balance of human- and systems-based processes operating in concert with one another in order to complete the transaction.

TCM: The process of automation

Transactional content management marries capture and business process management tools with workflow and enterprise content management solutions designed to help not only with the burden of managing paper documents, but also with the tasks associated with processing the transactions they represent.

The goal of successfully orchestrating both the human- and systems-based processes involved in AR is ultimately to streamline each component to the greatest extent possible. The focus is on the cost, speed and productivity of the process. However, in order to do so, it is first necessary to analyze and understand the process before putting a solution into production. This practice is known as business process management (BPM) and with the tools available on the market today, process modeling and simulation can help businesses identify opportunities for further optimization and avoid bottlenecks before they occur.

The next stage is to determine the execution details required to process each task. In order for a check to be reconciled against a list of transactions, both check information and the remittance stub data need to be readily available. In a legacy AR environment, this has been an inefficient paper-centric process – with a copy of each paper document on the desk of the person processing the transaction.

Within an automated model, captured images of both the check and list are actively ‘pushed’ to the operators desktop where they can be viewed and worked via a validation interface that has been customized to make processing the transaction both quick and intuitive. Not only are these types of interfaces easy to operate within, but they are easy to design as well. Tools driven by a basic graphical user interface allow these forms to be built with ease – and without the need for programming skills – thanks to drag-and-drop functionality which allow users to modify forms ‘on-the-fly’ by adding or removing fields. The goal is to minimize navigation so each transaction can be processed with minimal labor involved, which is essential when less-skilled resources are being utilized or processing is performed overseas.

The most robust solutions will also provide activity monitoring so that real-time processing data can be used to determine whether further tweaks to the system are required in order to achieve maximum through-put. This information can be delivered via web portals or dashboards designed to give a ‘30,000-foot view’ of the transactional workflow and the batch-level remittance documents each transaction represents.

Delivering data is not as simple as merely exporting text as common separated values, despite what some vendors in the remittance space would have their customers believe. In order to achieve true process optimization, businesses require:

• Immediate and flexible access to their information from points all around the globe at any time during the 24-hour day.
• Data capture at the source, even if that means spanning distributed enterprises across multiple geographies.
• Fast and intuitive retrieval – collaboration and compliance are virtual impossibilities as long as transactional data remains in information silos.
• Built-in data security – there is no way to track who has accessed information if it is locked-away in filing cabinets.

The bottom line

If left to the cost-savings and process improvement of managing checks and remittance documents alone, it would be easy to demonstrate a return-on-investment for deploying a transactional content management solution to automate the process. Forrester Research estimates that it can cost upwards of $20 to file one document, and $120 to have that same document retrieved if it has been lost or misfiled someplace. And this expense is compounded even further when businesses take into consideration the storage and transportation costs associated with paper.

But when you consider the high price of choosing not to automate accounts receivable and instead relying on legacy methods for processing these mission-critical transactions, the initial cost of ownership for the technology involved is dwarfed by the opportunity cost it represents. In today’s competitive business environment, successful companies need to take advantage of every opportunity to decrease costs, speed cycle times and increase productivity. And where better to begin than with your organization’s transactions – the life-blood of your business?

Peter Bedell is Solutions Marketing Manager for EMC.  EMC Corporation is a leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com