How Captaris solutions can help
Organisations that have done an audit to find out how many paper-centric business processes still exist in the organisation may have been surprised to discover inefficiencies that are impacting productivity and cash flow. Look for electronic document management solutions that also maximise your investment in Microsoft IT infrastructure. This is a good strategy that will help contain costs, maximise end-user participation, and ensure a future growth path into service oriented architectures (SOA).
There is no getting around the need to manage increasingly huge amounts of documents, from creation through processing to disposition. But there is a way to make it easier and more cost effective. The Alchemy solution easily manages all documents in a package that is extremely affordable compared to enterprise content management suites.
Most information in every organisation exists as unstructured data – the documents created every day by people outside of structured databases containing valuable or even critical content that must be secured, shared and retained. Eventually all documents become “fixed” content or content in its final form – images, faxes, emails, PDFs, invoices, CAD files, statements, reports, etc. Effectively managing the lifecycle of this massive amount of information is crucial for compliance, risk reduction and overall corporate efficiency.
Using Alchemy solutions to capture, manage and archive documents, organisations can manage unstructured documents through their entire lifecycle. Alchemy leverages proprietary technologies including a search engine, document viewers, workflow solutions and more, specifically designed to make it easy to deploy, manage and use. This makes it possible to deliver a full featured solution in a smaller, easier to implement and more affordable package. Alchemy is purposely designed to utilise inexpensive archive storage options and imaging hardware, further reducing total cost of ownership. Alchemy solutions integrate with other Captaris products to provide a single source for fax, workflow, document management, archiving and document delivery solutions.
If you have implemented ISO 9000 or the TQM compliant environment, you know this is only the first step in the process to achieve compliance. The key is to keep it going.
Business process management and business process automation are the tools which could make it happen. You will not only be able to track events in a process but most importantly you will be alerted if something you expect is not likely to happen. Captaris Workflow with its business rules engine is the tool that can facilitate just this.
Today’s economy requires that businesses take a practical approach to managing productivity and costs. The mandate is to optimise efficient processes throughout the organisation. In their ongoing search to improve productivity, many companies are looking at business process management (BPM) as a means to increase productivity and extend system functionality without requiring rewrites of corporate policies and procedures. BPM details how a business operates by analysing the roles of personnel, areas of business and processes. Business process automation (BPA) goes one step further by automating various aspects of those roles, areas and processes to ensure consistent and repeatable performance.
An important side benefit of BPA comes from capturing and preserving the business function knowledge of key individuals. This repository of business knowledge rewards organisations with a better understanding of the company’s structure and formalised procedures that stay with the company even when workers leave. BPM helps an organisation focus on acquiring, storing and utilising knowledge for such things as problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning and decision making. BPM also protects intellectual assets from decay, adding to the organisation’s overall intelligence and providing increased flexibility.
Using BPA to automate activities also helps to monitor the progress or bottlenecks of a company. Once implemented, automated business processes can assist in the training of new employees or provide a standardisation of processes internally for use with the organisation’s customers or suppliers. To begin developing business process workflows, an organisation needs to analyse how it works, determine what its people know and identify areas for improvement. Many organisations discover these areas as a process of continuous analysis, but as a general rule BPA has the greatest economic impact in situations where:
• Processes are currently managed via paper forms that are physically moved around the organisation.
• Multiple employees or teams of employees are collaborating on a single document or unit of work.
• Approval steps are numerous and business critical.
The quicker a workflow is made available the sooner an organisation will realise increased productivity, efficiency and cost savings.
If you are considering investing in multi-function peripherals to reduce cost of ownership of multiple printers, scanners and copiers, and you expect to save some valuable office space at the same time, you may further extend your savings by removing your standalone fax machines. These can all be replaced by a fax server integrated with MFPs. RightFax is already integrated with all major brands and models on the market. Furthermore, RightFax fulfils all your needs for desktop faxing and for high-volume production faxing from existing applications like CRM, ERP and others.
The RightFax family of products provides robust, reliable and integrated fax servers and electronic document delivery capabilities. Designed to be scalable and expandable, RightFax Servers provide flexibility and control required to meet the document delivery needs of small departments or large enterprises. Whether it is integrating with email, desktop and document management applications or fax-enabling high-volume document delivery from CRM, ERP and host applications, RightFax Servers make it simple for organisations to reduce costs, improve productivity and meet compliance goals.
As a market leader with nearly four times the market share of any other vendor, RightFax servers provide unrivalled reliability, scalability and ease of use for IT staff and desktop users alike. A comprehensive suite of optional add-on modules allows companies to customise each RightFax Server for the unique needs of the fax users, work groups and workload, whether to support specialised fax servers and electronic document delivery, integrating with email and other third-party applications, or incorporating a wide array of powerful administrative utilities.
The Captaris product platform is further tightly integrated with MFPs. One of the big trends within organisations today is to consolidate printing, scanning and copying services on centralised MFPs to save valuable time, resources and office space. Those who have managed multiple printers, scanners and copy machines know that consolidating these services provides substantial savings. While these savings are generally recognised you may still have other office equipment draining limited resources – standalone fax devices and fax modems scattered around your organisation. Combining fax capabilities with your MFPs saves time, money and puts you ahead of technology consolidation trends.
Fax server software combined with MFPs and other business applications do the job more quickly and efficiently so employees can be more effective. Fax server software also reduces cost of ownership and does the job more securely.
The combination of Alchemy, Captaris Workflow and RightFax solutions provides a powerful platform for business growth, addresses immediate needs. and facilitates flexibility into the future. Combined with Microsoft Office this platform makes a sound investment.
About Captaris
Captaris, Inc. is a leading provider of software products that automate business processes, manage documents electronically and provide efficient information delivery. The product suite of Captaris RightFax, Captaris Workflow and Captaris Alchemy Document Management is distributed through a global network of leading technology partners. Captaris has customers in financial services, healthcare, government and many other industries, and products are installed in all of the Fortune 100 and many Global 2000 companies. Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington with European Office located in Vianen, The Netherlands, Captaris was founded in 1982 and is publicly traded on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol CAPA. For more information, please visit www.captaris.com.
Captaris products deliver benefits such as:
• Quicker return on investment.
• A simpler framework for compliance.
• Increased productivity.
• Employee job satisfaction.
• Elimination of duplicated information from double and/or triple entry.
• Ease of retrieving old information instantly.