Paper shuffling continues

Posted by Mark Brousseau

“While I’m not surprised that we haven’t seen the ‘Holy Grail’ of putting co-mingled documents into a scanner, and letting the system and software figure it out, I am surprised by the amount of manual processes in place at most companies,” Mark Smith of OPEX said during a panel discussion Monday at FUSION 2010 at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. The panel brought together document management solutions providers to offer their perspectives on the results of TAWPI’s 2009 Document Management Study.

Smith noted that 67 percent of survey respondents indicated that they are still inserting document separators. “That is a ton of document separators – with expensive paper and ink,” Smith said.

ibml’s Derrick Murphy told attendees that he was surprised by the lower-than-expected adoption rate of automated document classification technology. “This reminds me of the days when people thought ICR [intelligent character recognition] was going to save the day,” Murphy said. “The problem with auto-classification is the high costs associated with miss-classifications and errors. The technology simply has to become more intelligent. When that happens, it will open up a tremendous amount of cost savings, as well as opportunities to better leverage intelligent scanners to out-sort documents based on their content.”

Jim Wanner of KeyMark also was struck by “the lack of software utilized for front-end document classification.”

Murphy added that he was surprised that less than two-thirds of survey respondents track their imaging production rates. “If you don’t track your production rates, you can’t accurately track your costs,” Murphy noted. “And, in this economy, I’m shocked that operations wouldn’t want to know their true costs.”

Jim Thumma of Optical Image Technology (OIT) said organizations should strive to track their document management costs end-to-end -- from capture to archive -- to look for opportunities to remove inefficiencies.