Interviews

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 02 - April 2010

The Destiny digital pen solution helped DocuWare to win a Project of the Year Award at the 2009 DM Awards. DM Editor Dave Tyler catches up with destiny's Tom Thiselton to find out what the future holds for these technology innovators

Dave Tyler: The digital pen concept as developed by Anoto has been around for a few years now, but Destiny is one of the first companies to develop business solutions that are finding genuine traction in the market. What is it about the Destiny approach that makes you different? Tom Thiselton: The idea is almost a 'back to basics' offering: all the advantages of using paper, but with the added benefits of digitalised documents, such as indexing, saving and of course distribution. To give some context: in the coming year it is estimated that some 400 billion forms will be processed and over 50 trillion documents printed. At the same time, in a traditional setup (post-room, fax, scanning etc.) it can take up to four weeks for a form to be processed from the time data is originally captured.

Realising that we're never going to move completely away from paper, more and more organisations are looking for a middle ground. To us the best of both worlds is to digitise the pen and paper itself - it requires next to no change to working practices but with all the inherent benefits of digital documentation (distribution/sharing, archiving with key indexes). To this end Destiny offers a solution, whether you're looking to better manage and convert your notes, reduce the time spent processing documents or develop a bespoke forms application that converts and integrates with any back office system. DT: How does a technology like yours add value to a document management or workflow process?

TT: The digital pen overcomes two key challenges faced by the document management industry; data capture and third party integration. With Destiny, completely secure data can be manipulated into any database or workflow process, and by the simple expedient of a mobile phone you can easily create a mobile data capture solution, not dependent on a USB docking station or a PC. It really is that simple: fill in the form using the pen, tick 'send' and an application on the mobile phone sends the data directly using GPS via the Destiny processing engine and into the back-office system - whatever that may be, in whatever format the user may require.

For the last five years Destiny has targeted mobile workforces in the majority of vertical markets including healthcare, construction, logistics, police forces and councils. Our project teams work alongside the client on optimising their forms and analysing the back-office requirements. Some clients are happy just receiving images, other need text fields to be converted and passed into systems like Salesforce or DocuWare. Other clients have specific challenges: Morrisons' roadside repair teams needed to send 'before & after' photographs along with their reports, so we developed a photo attachment function for them. They have been able to reduce their data entry turnaround time by over 60%, as well as gaining additional useful data: job start and end times, GPRS coordinates, ultimately increasing their productivity. This kind of application helps us offer clients a much more comprehensive view of their mobile workforce.

A key benefit to the users is that we are not significantly changing their existing processes - just 'swapping out' the traditional pen and paper. There's little to no user training required, IT support is minimal and because of the low cost we offer a surprisingly fast return on investment.

DT: What else is Destiny doing to widen take-up of digital pen-based solutions? TT: fastdox, a recent innovation from Destiny, cuts out the forms development process and makes the technology much faster and easier to use: once installed it allows users to 'print' any document from their PC into a graphical format that can be used with the digital pen. This is an out-ofthe- box offering with a one-off cost and no ongoing support fees - users can be up and running within fifteen minutes. This is already gaining us a lot of interest from elsewhere in the document management industry.

fastdox offers an easy way for users to capture documents and deliver them into third party applications, for instance, Nuance's OCR software, SaaS platforms such as DocuWare 5 or any other workflows. So, for those companies out there offering conversion and workflow, we can add value in the form of an alternative to post, fax, scanning or even e-forms. They can now offer their users a way to direct a document from the pen itself and have it in their systems.

Finally it's not just about capturing data in the field, but also adding notes to designs, signing contracts, purchase orders or POD notes: the potential uses for fastdox are endless, it seems, giving freedom to work in the office or on the move, with full auditability and saving time, effort and money.

More info: www.destinyplc.com

Interviews