eForms 101 part 2

A short while ago I wrote a blog entitled eForms 101…and I’d like to continue on the theme. I mentioned some of the main advantages of eForms – that they save money, are green, fast, accurate, malleable – and thus they improve customer service.

One of the real values of eForm use is that it can be coupled with a workflow. When a paper form arrives there is lots of processing time. Routing the form electronically takes a fraction of the time it takes to physically route paper. And tracking the progress of a routed paper form is slow and can be frustrating. Think of the last time you had to call a long chain of people looking for a piece of paper any of them may or may not have — woof. Again, an eForm that has been routed electronically using a workflow is easy to check up on. No calls. Just view the progress map and you can see who’s got the ball. And parallel workflow routing offers a way to speed up routing exponentially over physical counterpart processes. If an item is stuck in a queue or inbox too long, it can trigger alerts or can be automatically routed for processing. If I am the customer who submitted information to a company, that’s how I want my info taken care of!

In terms of return on investment (ROI), labor costs are obviously reduced because it is now quicker to locate a form, get it approved, share it widely or launch it through a specialized review path, etc. But beyond this is the less tangible benefit of making employees more productive overall. And the fact that ALL the ‘i’s are dotted and the ‘t’s are crossed with alacrity and quality control contributes greatly to improved decision making.

Now some thoughts on how to get going quickly. If this is an initial foray into eForms and workflows, I suggest the paper process to be replaced is simple and well understood. Paper forms can be reproduced electronically verbatim, so filling the form will be instantly intuitive to the user. Focus on high volume forms to cost justify the endeavor. If your goal is to take a process to the extreme in automation, be sure to take a phased approach. Basic form and workflow capabilities must come first, and must work perfectly. A tool always worth mentioning to get eForms up and running fast is Texcel FormBridge. Using a per page licensing fee, this tool allows you to convert paper or TIFs, or flat PDFs into eForms for a variety of products. What’s the big deal? Well, scan in a paper form filled with fields and watch FormBridge work. It identifies automagically where the fields go, and what their titles are. The eForm looks like the input form, nicely formatted. All the text in the form is editable – including field titles. And the same is true with all those scattered myriad rows of checkboxes. They are all converted to eForm checkboxes with proper labels. From paper to LiquidOffice eForm in the blink of an eye.

After you get a chance to review the business benefits of eForms in your organization, time to ask :

• Where is your organization right now on the paperless scale?

• Is paper use on the rise?

• Are services that impact customer satisfaction stalled due to cumbersome paper processes?

• Has your existing eForm initiative lost any momentum?

ImageSource is staffed to help you, with industry veterans including: Systems Engineers, Support Engineers, Developers, Project Managers, Sales Staff, and Senior Managers.

ILINX Capture Remote Management

In the years that we have been doing ILINX Capture implementations a common question usually comes up from the IT Administrators; “Do we have to log on to the server to access the administration and management features?”  The answer is: “No, the ILINX Capture Server Manager can be utilized by any remote computer with the proper access.”

The reason why this comes up is because there is a lot of functionality in the ILINX Capture Server Manager.  Not only from the technical administration perspective, but also from the business management side.  For example, you have the ability to monitor the system status, review audit logs, configure security, monitor batches/documents and queues, and much more.  All of this functionality can be individually enabled or disabled for specific users and groups depending on their needs.

The following steps show you how to install the Server Manager for remote access to the software’s administration features;

1.  Run the Software Install and choose “ILINX Server Manager” from the install package…

 

2.  Ensure that the workstation has port access to the ILINX Capture database open to Database.  For example, if you are using SQL Server for your database the default port is 1433.

3.  Provide the user/group with the proper administration access. 

a.  For a Line of Business Manager, it is common to just allow them access to monitor and manage the batches/documents in their queues

b.  For Tech Support, it is common to allow access to the Audit logs and System Monitoring features

This remote administration and management functionality has proven to be a valuable tool for this software over the years.  For more advanced remote admin/management tasks in ILINX Capture, feel free to leave a question in the comments and I will respond.  If enough similar questions are asked, I will drop another post on the more advanced tasks. 

Ryan Keller

ImageSource, Inc.

 

eForms 101

I recently gave a presentation at our Nexus convention about eForms — and how they can produce real business value. Although the presentation was meant for those who have not spent much time analyzing the benefits of e-forms, some real industry heavyweights showed up. Unfortunately this was a lost opportunity because if I had more time I would’ve handed over the microphone for additional eForm paradigms and parables. Alas I had more material than time. Here’s a brief discussion of some of the topics I covered.

An eForm is of course an electronic representation of a paper form. In fact, many eForms look exactly like their paper counterpart. When a paper process goes electric, you’re not just leaving the paper behind. You are opening the door to processing times that are dramatically more expedient, and a host of other advantages.

Because of their inherent characteristics, eForms:

• save money
  • When it can costs $20 to file a document and up to $314 per filing cabinet for the real state it consumes, you know storing paper isn’t cheap. And it can cost up to $220 to reproduce a lost document.

• are green
  • Since the United States is the world’s largest producer and consumer paper, and for more than half of all organizations paper use is on the rise – the green choice is to reproduce paper processes electronically

• are malleable
  • What if you just snail mailed one million requests for information and then discovered a fatal error in the text of your paper document. You can do the math here — it would be expensive to fix this, and slow. Online eForms can be changed in flash with very little effort or cost.

• are fast
  • It’s true that performing optical character recognition is pretty quick. But that leaves out all the document preparation and scanning time, not to mention time spent correcting OCR errors. There are no OCR errors in eForms and processing is of course very very quick.

• are accurate
  • eForms have a lot of advantages over paper forms in terms of accuracy. You can perform database lookups and provide extensive online help with links to vast information resources on the Internet or your intranet. But more importantly you can have script ensure that required fields are not skipped and that incorrectly formatted data is never entered. These days, you can just click a checkbox to perform a lot of validation checks within an e-form product.

• improve customer service
  • Faster processing of customer data improves customer retention and satisfaction. Reduction of lost or compromised customer data inherently improves customer satisfaction. Money saved by converting a paper process to an electronic process can and oftentimes should be redirected toward customer satisfaction initiatives.

Before getting started on a new e-form project, it is wise to consider return on investment. Make sure that you have a justifiable volume for the effort. Then I think you should focus on forms with low complexity allowing everyone in the process to learn the ropes. There will be plenty of time in the future — probably the very near future — to ramp up the complexity because requests will likely pour in.

Please keep your eye open for a follow-up eForm 101 blog with a discussion of workflow integration, more thoughts on ROI, and some useful tools and techniques for ramping up quickly.

Nexus 2010

I recently attended the Technology conference put on by my company. Nexus®, as it is dubbed, is where we try to bring in all the local and national minds in our ECM space together. On the vendor side we had both hardware and software manufacturers represented. On the standards side we had credits offered for PMI, ARMA, AHIMA, and IAPP just by attending. There was pre-conference training on  Oracle I/PM 11g, a risk management course, and an AIIM ECMp course. For the user community we had attendees from Fortune 50 companies  down to small government agencies and everything in between. Sounds great right? It was.

As with any conference, you have to make it to the break out session that relate to you, and make connections with people that you can relate to. The latter was easy of course, we are all living and breathing the ECM world. Even if your content is different, the pain points are nearly always the same. It’s great to connect with others and find out their resolutions to similar issues, their approach to common problems, and to hear their success stories. Besides giving a presentation on our product ILINX® Integrate (something I have blogged about in the past), I also attended sessions on advanced document capture, ILINX Content Store, Oracle I/PM, and sessions on project management.

The breakout sessions had real value for me. The sharing of knowledge is essentially what Nexus is all about and the break outs are core to that. In years past, I have attended Nexus but allowed myself to do project work or provide technical support for the conference itself during the breakout sessions. This year I made it a point to attend as many sessions as possible and only missed two. I am confident I took the right approach.

I attended Shon Mueller’s presentation on advanced capture solutions and it was great. He was dynamic and brought a wealth of experience in his years at Kofax, ImagesSource, and other ECM technology companies. Jon Sutherland’s presentation on ILINX Content Store was informative for me as well. As a system’s engineer that’s busy in the field I haven’t had as much time as would like to work with our latest product offering. ILINX Content Store is a real solution for content management and I am quite confident we will see and hear more about it. Les Harris’ session on upgrading to Oracle I/PM 11g was an eye opener. I have worked extensively with the I/PM product line for many years and the new product accomplishes the same functions as all previous versions, but with an entirely new architecture. For those planning on sticking with the product it is time to start planning your upgrade path now. I also attended a session on project management in which Dennis Brooke discussed how to use Web 2.0 technologies to streamline project management and enhance project morale. The session sparked lots of questions form the audience and I could see the wheels turning as people thought how they could use these ideas in their own corporate structure. I worked with Dennis for many years and it was great to hear about some of the lessons learned and successes.

I have linked to all the presentations, please feel free to review them and all the other’s on the Nexus site.  All in all Nexus 2010 was a success and I can’t wait to see what ImageSource puts together for next year.

  

ILINX Content Store Rocks

ImageSource has created a new distributed Scan, Store, Retrieve imaging system called ILINX® Content Store. Content Store will be demonstrated at the upcoming Nexus® 2010 ECM Conference (Nov 4-5 in Bellevue, Washington http://www.nexusecm.com/index.htm).

ILINX Content Store provides the means to import images and universal documents that have been indexed and released into a folder from multiple scanning solutions. Documents can also be manually indexed into Content Store from its interface. The system is accessed via a web browser and uses Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation as the user interface. This allows a modern functional interface into the system. Content Store can be accessed from MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome.

ILINX Content Store is perfect for small to large document storage needs. Imported documents are stored within a database making backup, security, and scalability straightforward.

I’ll take you on a quick tour of the product. We’ve wired up ILINX Capture, an advanced distributed capture solution to scan a document into ILINX Content Store. Advanced versions of Content Store will also provide simple direct scanning mechanism.

First I log in to ILINX Capture using Internet Explorer in order to scan a document. ILINX Capture and ILINX Content Store are running off premises on a company web server so I can access them via the internet.

ILINX Capture Login

Next, I select a scan source and application, scan a document, then release it to the backend system.

ILINX Capture Scan

At this point, I could delegate indexing to another staff member but will do it myself. I select the Index tab in ILINX Capture and open the document, index it, and Complete it.

ILINX Capture Index

Now the document resides in ILINX Content Store with my index values. I can now go view the document from my web browser. After logging in to ILINX Content Store in Internet Explorer, I choose the application containing my document, enter a search criteria, and execute the search.

Content Store Search

My document is retrieved and displayed.

Content Store Display Image

Universal documents such as Microsoft WORD, Excel, etc. display right in the ILINX Content Store interface using the native application. Any document can be opened and viewed if the computer opening the document has the correlating application installed.

Content Store with WORD

ILINX Content Store is an easy to use, streamlined solution for quickly ingesting content using distributed techniques. Come check it out at NEXUS 2010!

Clint Lewis
Senior Systems Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.



  

Oracle IPM Invoice Processing Accelerators

Oracle is rolling out best-practice ERP AP invoice processing solution accelerators as part of their 11g Fusion Middleware offering. Called “adapters”, these ERP software components are available for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.

 The accelerators are a mechanism to ensure scanned invoices reach a backend ERP system for final handling even when there are issues in the invoice data gathered using OCR forms recognition during scanning. This allows for minimal user exception handling or intervention prior to each invoice arriving in the ERP system. The idea is to simply load the scanner with invoices, press a button, and then handle the invoices once they arrive in the backend.

 In order for this approach to work, Oracle’s solution accelerators use XML documents to contain header and line invoice data. The XML documents are combined with business rules in an Oracle BPEL Process Manager workflow that automatically massages the data into a format that will be accepted by the ERP import functionality such as the Oracle EBS open interface table import. The invoice image resides in the Oracle IPM system.

 In the case where data can’t be massaged sufficiently for insert, the invoice is keyed from image from within the BPEL workflow. Invoices that directly insert into the ERP system arrive either ready for validation, matching, payment, coding, etc., or are placed on hold with a hold code and a hold reason code. Some sample hold and reason codes are:

FIELD	VALIDATION	HOLD	HOLD REASON
Purchase Order	PO must be valid and open. PO vendor must match invoice vendor.	IPM_INVALID_PO_HOLD	INVALID PO NUM INACTIVE PO INCONSISTENT PO SUPPLIER
Supplier	Supplier is required. Supplier must exist in vendor master. Supplier ID and supplier site ID must match.	IPM_INVALID_ SUPPLIER_HOLD	NO SUPPLIER INVALID SUPPLIER INCONSISTENT SUPPLIER

 There are many more business rules that operate on each invoice inside of workflow that meet the requirements of the ERP system.

 Oracle has created a flash demo of a scan to EBS process at:

 http://bit.ly/aHaNwl

 Oracle has also created a PDF document that highlights the E-Business Suite Adapter:

 http://bit.ly/b4pGFa

 As an Oracle partner, ImageSource has begun to implement these solutions in the field.

Clint Lewis
Senior Systems Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.

  

ILINX Product Suite

I am not usually out to promote specific products on this blog, but I have been getting really excited about the latest advancements in the ILINX Product Suite.  It is an area that I, among other experienced ECM technologists, have utilized our expertise in creating and refining solutions that can provide real world value for businesses implementing or utilizing ECM solutions.  Take a minute to read this quick post and judge for yourself the value that ILINX Products can provide for your organization.

You may be hearing the word ILINX used in Enterprise Content Management circles more and more these days.  From the humble beginnings of a simple release script connecting a document capture system to an ECM repository the ILINX Product Suite has grown into a set of powerful, easy to use products that provide quick ROI.  There are multiple levels to the ILINX Product Suite ranging from a full blown web client based document capture system (ILINX Capture) or an ECM Repository (ILINX Content Store) to variety of middleware products that can provide time savings and productivity boosting results like ILINX Integrate.

If you are not familiar with all that the Product Suite has to offer, check out the ILINX website for the details and product demos.

-Ryan Keller

Match Fields Early when Designing an Imaging Solution

When building an enterprise level imaging system, one of the most important early tasks is matching up the fields in the solution. A typical ERP imaging solution has fields in the following functional areas:

Scan and validation
Image repository
Workflow template
Temporary tables for line items and custom forms
EBS tables

Looking at the big picture, the entire imaging solution is simply a transportation system for meta data stored in table columns (fields) at various stages from paper scan to workflow, to voucher creation. Fields carry information that tie to a specific image document.

Many fields map across each step of the process and must have the same data types. Some fields are used uniquely during scanning, image retrieval, workflow, or in the ERP backend. It is very difficult to begin a project until all these fields are well-known and understood.

One of the challenges of matching up fields is that each area may refer to a field data type (string, integer, etc.) in a slightly different way. An experienced architect and solutions implementor will resolve the type quirks during implementation.

I’ve found the best way to understand how the fields map across the solution is to create a single table with a common set of fields names and data types with columns indicating areas of use, rather than creating separate tables spread throughout the project plan for each area.

Since project plans are lengthy, having a single field mapping table makes it much easier to create the necessary fields, templates, and tables during project implementation since you don’t have to jump around in the project document to find the needed information. Also, having a single table prevents incorrectly mapped fields between functional areas because the big picture view is simple to understand.

I like to use color to highlight specific logical field groupings and keep notes for each field. I tend to continuously revise the master table as the project unfolds and additional information is discovered and then email each revision to the key project players so that everyone is working from the same assumptions.

Here is a link to a sample field mapping table. The table can be improved by adding a column that contains realistic sample data for each field. I use basic field type nomenclature and convert the types as needed in each functional environment.

If you are responsible for putting together a project plan for an imaging system deployment, or work in a company with an imaging system, I encourage you to have a table like this that matches your system. It’s very useful.

Clint Lewis
Senior Systems Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.

  

Oracle IPM 11g Released!

For those of you who have not heard Oracle has released the next generation of their Enterprise Content Management Software, Imaging and Process Management (IPM) 11g.  This version is the first major step that Oracle has taken to tightly integrate the product into Oracle’s overall software architecture…IPM 11g has been completely overhauled to be part of the Fusion Middleware (FMW) tech stack.  From the ECM perspective, Oracle now has a complete seamlessly integrated end to end offering that includes the storage repository, document management, business process management, library services, web publishing, records management, reporting/monitoring and application integration.  This creates many advantages for customers that use or plan to use other Oracle products in their workplace, as well as, integrating and leveraging existing investments in non-Oracle software.

I have been working as a Systems Engineer and Project Manager with the IPM software base for over 8 years, through the Stellent IBPM acquisition, all the way back to the Optika Acorde and eMedia days.  A couple major differences in implementing the latest Oracle 11g version are the requirements for Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) for the storage repository and Oracle WebLogic Server for the application/web server.  I look at both of these requirements in a positive light.  UCM and WebLogic Server are powerful robust products that provide standard approaches to managing content storage and applications, respectively, from the FMW perspective.  With that said, if you do not have experience with either UCM or WebLogic, you will need to get up to speed with them to succeed in an IPM implementation.  Neither of these products can be installed through the “Next, Next, Next, Finished!” approach, so careful upfront planning and architecting is required to ensure a successful implementation. 

Let’s talk about the new user interface a little bit.  Oracle has followed suit with the rest of the major players in the ECM world by creating a complete web based interface for performing all administrative and end user functions.  This makes administration duties of the system much easier than in past versions that require administration to be done through the “thick” client.  Also, by moving to the WebLogic Server the full featured web interface is now much more browser agnostic than in the past.  The image viewer comes in two flavors that support over 400 file formats; a zero footprint view only version and the a re-written java applet that allows for full annotations, annotation security, and server based conversion/rendering for access speed.  The following are a couple of screen captures of the user interface from IPM 11g:

The Client Interface

The Zero Footprint Viewer

The Java Applet Viewer

Lastly, I would like to touch on a feature that is often overlooked when implementing ECM solutions, application integration. Oracle has done a great job in IPM 11g to provide some powerful capabilities for leveraging investments into Oracle and non-Oracle applications through integration.  For a process where users are assigning metadata to a record in their business application, through application integration this data can be pushed to and associated with the document stored in IPM 11g. Another example of integration would be the image enablement of a business application.  In this case a user could be accessing records in their ERP system a hotkey, menu item, or button in the application screen can retrieve and display the document from IPM without the user ever having to leave their business application.  These capabilities can create significant efficiencies in an organization through increased user productivity, the reduction of training and the simplification of support and administration. 

All in all I see the changes that Oracle made in IPM 11g as great additions to an already strong platform.  Oracle has a product that not only adheres to their architecture model, but also will provide many benefits to the customers that use it.  Stay tuned to this blog for more information related to our experiences with Oracle IPM 11g.

Ryan Keller

Project Manager

ImageSource, Inc.

  

ProStor and Oracle IPM — First Look

ProStor Systems sells a line of disk cartridge archival systems with some very compelling features. A representative of ProStor attended Nexus 2009 to demonstrate their systems, and as an Oracle IPM architect I was intrigued to see how well ProStor’s InfiniVault® would work in an IPM environment. So an associate and I visited ProStor’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado with an Oracle IPM test system to put the InfiniVault system through its paces. 

We hooked up a direct network crossover cable to the archival system in the same NT Workgroup, and then attempted to configure IPM to talk to it. We found we had to set the IPM services account name and login to be exactly the same as configured in InfiniVault. Note that InfiniVault requires at least an 8 character password so the IPM services account must follow suit.

Once we had communication, images and universal documents flowed quickly into the archive system. Retrieval of objects from the archive system was very fast. We think setting IPM to archive older objects from expensive RAID 5 magnetic storage to InfiniVault can provide an opportunity to utilize the faster storage for current daily object retrieval, while placing less often accessed objects into long term storage. 

The ProStor system comes with a built in full text indexing feature we thought might be useful with IPM but unfortunately IPM stores all universal documents in a proprietary binary, with no file extension, which is what InfiniVault keys on to apply IFilters in order to index the data from many common file structures. 

InfiniVault also comes with a sophisticated records management capability but this can’t be used with IPM in any meaningful way due to the way IPM stores and tracks objects. However, the records management system could be used with many other common activities in an enterprise since InfiniVault can be used for all general archival tasks within an organization. 

Many more features are available with ProStor archival systems and we will be recommending them to our customers for IPM object archival. Feel free to contact me or  ImageSource for more information.

Clint Lewis
Senior Technical Architect
ImageSource, Inc.