Technology

Data Capture Examples

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Do More with Less

All organisations rely heavily on their ability to receive documents. Examples of important documents include;

  • Purchase Orders
  • Invoices
  • Remittances
  • Delivery Advice
  • Timesheets
  • Instructions to transfer funds
  • Applications forms
  • Contracts
  • Insurance Claims

These documents can be received in a number of ways such as;

  • Fax
  • Post
  • Email
  • Voice
  • SMS
  • Web Form
  • XML
  • Data transferred from an external system

Important business processes are dependent on the data contained in these documents being routed to the appropriate individuals or teams quickly. The information contained in these documents is then used to make a decision or entered into one of your internal systems so a decision or action can be taken further down the line.

Ultimately, your organisation’s ability to act on the information it receives affects;

  • Customer Service
  • Ability to meet Service Level Agreements
  • Cash Flow
  • Deadlines imposed by industry or Government regulation

Whilst these documents are critical to your business, they also generate high volumes of work. Many companies are forced to employ extra staff just to manage the process of routing documents to the right person and manually entering the key information stored in these forms into internal systems. The task of entering information from a document into a system is a mundane and time consuming when handled manually. There is often a high staff turnaround due to the fact that these roles are often low paid and offer the employee little in the way of stimulation. The Management overhead therefore is high because staffing levels need to be maintained, new employees need to be adequately trained and extra effort is required to increase morale all contributing to higher costs.

In many cases, documents are initially received by a regional office and forwarded to a central location. This leads to further delays and increases the risk of losing important business documents especially if they are being posted. If documents are being re-faxed, the quality of the data will deteriorate seriously. This leads to incorrect information being entered into your systems and further problems down the line. Even email isn’t an ideal way of moving these documents between offices as it is so easy to lose them in the hundreds of other emails we receive everyday.

  • High costs for staff and training
  • Motivation and morale
  • Prone to errors
  • Difficult to prioritise tasks
  • Hard to measure and manage productivity

Increasing the speed and accuracy at which you process important documents could benefit your business in the following ways;

  • Faster order processing with fewer mistakes
  • Improved debtor days due to fewer invoice discrepancies
  • Better customer service with faster turnarounds
  • Less resource dedicated to data-entry means lower costs
  • The ability to “do more with less” allows your business to grow

If any of your business processes rely on large volumes of paper being received and manually entered keyed into line of business applications, we would be happy to assess whether capture technology could improve this process. Click here to contact us.

More information

Please use the menu above left for more information. Alternatively you can call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@processflows.co.uk.