Interviews

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 02 - April 2010

For enterprises and bureaux/BPO service providers alike, large scale capture is becoming less about document management and more about business process management, as ibml’s Ashley Keil explains to DM Editor Dave Tyler

Dave Tyler: How has the capture market changed over the last year or two - and how has ibml had to modify its proposition to reflect those changes?

Ashley Keil: Just a few years ago, scanning was a capture process specifically for feeding into other software. Capture now at the hardware level is much more of an intelligent component, and at the same time the software surrounding that hardware capture has also become a lot more intelligent.

The capture sector has been associated with various 'buzzwords' over the years: it used to be all about archival, then OCR, OMR, forms templating, then IDR, and later came classification. Now in 2010 the buzzword in the market and certainly for us at ibml is Business Process Management, BPM. The market has changed significantly not just from a technology point of view but also from an application point of view. If you were buying scanners and software six years ago, you were buying for the A/P department, or orders, or shipping. It was an application-specific, department level activity, from a software and a scanner perspective. Technology changes have allowed things to 'move upstream', by which I mean we can now combine applications, and move forward in the process. So we now see a lot more scanning applications being 'point of entry', or centralised, or 'digital mailroom' - the three phrases mean the same thing, to an extent. Each individual department has had its capture processes amalgamated into one single point of capture. Users are now using intelligent products (software or hardware) to work out what it is they're scanning, and do the upfront workflow classification automatically. So when we talk about positioning ourselves in the market as that centralised, point of entry solution, we can do that with some justification, as a result of real demand from the business. DT: Are you saying that the key differentiator then for ibml has changed from 'fast and high volume', to 'highly intelligent'?

AK: The view of ibml as, if you like, 'a big fast bit of tin' will never go away - but nowadays it's probably 30% of what we actually sell. The other 70% is our intelligent front-end capture platform. There are attributes that a business will look for from a product like ours: not just the ability to work out upfront which documents are which, it's also the ability to effectively handle all those mixed documents. Invoices are handled very differently from a shipping order or a purchase order, for instance. Or in a financial institution, mortgage files are totally different from insurance files, or credit card applications. So our front end capture unit has to a) capture at speed, because it is capturing everything, and b) to be versatile enough to know what to do with each document type, all at once. This requires a lot of flexibility, and more importantly a lot of business process logic. We should be able to walk into, for instance, a major high street bank with maybe 50 workflow streams coming in, and say, rather than 50 departmental scanners, you could have one front-end solution. From a hardware point of view it can physically handle all those 50 work streams. More than that, we have the intelligence now on the scanner to work out what all the documents are, and perform some of the appropriate business process by physically dividing them, tagging them, recognising and validating them, before they are passed on to someone like an EMC, for instance.

DT: Is there not a danger that, as your solutions become more intelligent and more integrated with the business processes, you begin to tread on the toes of the document & content management vendors whose systems your solutions have historically 'fed into'? AK: Not at all - the two are great handshakes. Gartner has suggested that over 70% of physical capture at the front end is about labour costs, preparation, post-prep and consolidation - before it ever even hits the TIS, EMC, Kofax, ReadSoft or whatever system. So whatever a business can do to lower that cost - while making the next step more efficient - becomes a really good handshake. These companies are looking to sell solutions, of course, not components, so our proposition represents a potentially rewarding partnership for them and us.

We're seeing similar changes in the bureau/BPO sector: the idea used to be to have big fast scanners 'pumping' lots of images into back-end software as an isolated application. If you need to get through millions of bits of paper a day you're still going to come to us, of course. But the bigger bureaux and BPOs increasingly want to offer BPM services, value-added services with a decent margin, as opposed to competing on a pounds-perthousand documents basis. They can offer a more rounded service and at the same time get better customer 'lock-in' So whether in our end-user or BPO business we're seeing the same shift: away from 'fast, dumb capture' archival, distributed applications and capture, and towards a more upstream centralised processing approach: the single point of entry, which is our intelligent scanning platform.

More info: www.ibml.com

Interviews