Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 02 - April 2010

A recent AIIM survey highlights a renewed interest in centralised scanning, driven by increased investment in capture and recognition software.

This reverses a trend over the last few years where distributed scanning closer to the business process allows more accurate indexing by staff who are more closely involved in the outcome. The survey also highlights how paper still persists in and around the scanning process in most organisations. Doug Miles of AIIM discusses the findings

Traditionally, scanning and capture has been considered technically challenging. Achieving high throughput at minimum cost has required specialist machinery and skilled staff, hence the prevalence of service bureaus and outsourcers. There has in the past been some reluctance to invest in capture technology, particularly where manual keying costs have been reduced by low offshore labour rates and cheaper communications, enabling a combination of onshore scanning, with offshore remote keying into corporate legacy systems.

More reliable and more capable scanners, more automated capture processes, and in particular, the availability of a multi-function scanner/printer (MFP) in almost every office has led over the last 5 to 6 years to a new model of distributed scanning, local to the office staff processing the documents. In some scan-to-archive applications, particularly in professional services or healthcare, a scanner-per-desk policy can be viable.

SCANNING AND CAPTURE STRATEGIES

However, when AIIM asked the 750 respondents to our worldwide survey for their future strategy towards outsourced, centralised or distributed scanning, we saw a stabilisation in outsourcing, a small net increase in distributed scanning with MFPs, and a much bigger net increase in centralised scanning - as indicated in Figure 1. Digital mailroom scanning of all incoming mail also looks set for a considerable increase in popularity. As regards the strategy for post-scan data capture, we can see from Figure 2 that automated recognition and autoclassification seem set for a considerable increase, with the pattern being to consolidate spending on these capabilities into the centralised resource.

BENEFITS AND DISADVANTAGES

We asked respondents to compare the benefits and disadvantages of the three different approaches. Overall, 30% of the sample use outsourced services, citing the lack of staff management overheads as the main benefit, along with lower costper- scan. Integrating the scanned files back into the internal system is the biggest outsourcing issue along with turnaround time. Quality of indexing is an issue for 30% of outsource users. Centralised, in-house scanning services are used by 48% of respondents, and they cite better indexing and closer integration with the process as the main benefits. However, meeting demands for fast turnaround is given as the biggest issue with central scanning operations, followed by logistics and space problems. As expected, 78% of those surveyed have some form of distributed scanning via MFPs, desktop scanners or branchoffice scanners. Ownership of the process by the line of business owners is given as the main advantage, as well as improved utilization of MFPs.

The biggest drawback of distributed scanning is persuading and training staff to index properly, and maintaining quality of indexing over time. When asked whether automatic classification is more reliable than manual, opinions are evenly split, but with a net overall agreement. There is a more general agreement with the view that office staff still find scanners more intimidating to use than printers, and most (68%) agree that users feel paper records are still needed for "legal reasons" - a disappointing reflection on the efforts of our standards bodies on legal admissibility.

SCANNING AND CAPTURE ROI

Whichever strategy is being adopted, our survey respondents are very positive about the return on investment they are achieving. Improved findability of business documents, improved process throughput, and records security and accessibility are given as the main business drivers, with reduced physical storage space and less paper usage as follow up benefits.

Putting that into financial terms, 46% of users reported a payback period for their investment in scanning and capture of 12 months or less, with two-thirds seeing returns within 18 months. Whether viewed as an infrastructure enabler or against specific business processes, these are impressive returns. Scanning of invoices and application forms were deemed to be the best performing processes with over 60% citing excellent or good ROI for these.

WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH PAPER

As we can see in Figure 3, whilst 32% of organisations report that the consumption of paper and/or number of photocopies is still increasing, this is equally balanced by those who feel it is decreasing. On the positive side, 37% of organisations are scanning over half of their incoming documents and 12% scan more than 80%.

However, we found that 25% of users tend not to trust the scanning operation, and so they photocopy documents before letting them out of their hands. This is likely to be more prevalent with centralised and particularly outsourced operations than with distributed. Only 31% of scanned documents are destroyed after scanning, with a further 32% being archived off-site. Rather more intriguing is that taking the average of users' estimates, 52% of scanned documents are 100% "born digital", i.e., have come direct from a printer in another office or organisation with no additional marking. Even more intriguing is the user estimate in this survey, confirmed in a more recent AIIM survey on digital signatures, that more than half of process documents are printed solely for the purpose of adding a signature - not only increasing the paper consumption, but stalling the electronic workflow. On average, 3.5 additional photocopies or fax copies are needed in order to collect signatures.

CONCLUSION

We have seen in this survey a very positive view of the benefits of scanning and capture, and in particular, a move towards centralising of operations in order to allow a higher spend on automated capture, reducing manual intervention, and maximising the options for automated classification. Those organisations adopting a scan-on-entry philosophy are at last reducing their paper consumption and associated storage requirements, but there are a number of poor practices, even when scanning is carried out, which continue to proliferate paper copies. The full AIIM report is available as a free download from www.aiim.org.uk/research. Based on 769 responses from a selected sample of AIIM's 65,000 strong community of ECM users worldwide, the report is independent. It is underwritten by a number of industry sponsors - Autonomy, EMC, Epson, Image Source and Visioneer.

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