Over the past several years there has been a significant growth of interest around paperless office initiatives, as well as usage of enterprise-wide Records/ Document management solutions. However, a vast number of office-related tasks are still being conducted on paper. That being said, the importance of a company’s ability to utilize the full value of information that is located in these documents is vital.

Consider the Following Statistics:

• Companies typically misfile 20% of their documents (SOURCE | Tweet This Stat)
• Organizations continue to print, copy and fax more than a trillion pages of office paper each year (SOURCE | Tweet This Stat)
• Approximately $14,000 of productivity is lost per worker per year due to their inability to find necessary data ( SOURCE | Tweet This Stat)

As you can see, the effects of inefficient document management result in considerable wasted labor costs, as well as high levels of inefficiencies, leaving businesses vulnerable from a lost or misfiled document. Still, a large percentage of organizations report that document capture – the first step in the document management process — is the least automated process within their organization. Several organizations also report multiple, stagnant capture solutions across various departments within their enterprise, with a large percentage of the data-entry work still being done manually.

Enter Alfresco and Ephesoft.

By integrating Ephesoft with Alfresco, you can reduce or even all together eliminate the intensive labor associated with manually capturing data, while simultaneously lowering an organization’s dependence on paper documents. In doing so, organizations experience increased productivity on the ingestion as well as on the retrieval of documents, due to the alleviation of errors that can be attributed to human error.

The integration of Alfresco and Ephesoft allows workers to turn static content into dynamic, searchable text that is incorporated into an automated system for managing the full document lifecycle, from automated data capture to workflow validating and archive, ensuring the integrity and availability of corporate content. Ephesoft makes the entire process easier by possessing the ability to recognize limitless types of documents from virtually any source, including scanners, emails, existing images and faxes. As for the documents that already exist in the repository, Ephesoft can retrieve, scan, and classify those as well while leaving them in their delegated repository.

One of the biggest benefits this solution possesses is that Ephesoft does more than scan, it can be trained to recognize documents through the utilization of a number of technologies including Layout Classification or Optical Character Recognition (OCR).  Ephesoft learns, based on document type, what metadata is important, such as a page-title or other document features such as a barcode or QR code. By being able to determine the last page of a recurring document, Ephesoft enables workers to scan batches of .Tiff files without needing to worry about separator pages or other means of manual document separation. This allows for the entire document to be collected and then processed into the Alfresco repository.

Once Ephesoft has scanned the document,  it then automates the content ingestion process through the use of Lucene , which extracts key pieces of data from the document. These  data can include dates, load numbers, bar-code values or table line items just to name a few. The document is then passed to the full-featured Alfresco ECM repository where it is stored and classified according to the extracted metadata, and then automatically incorporated directly into content-centric business processes by the automated workflow, versioning, search/retrieval and publishing capabilities of the repository.

The capture of paper-based documents provides management with greater visibility into the flow of physical documents within the organization, allowing bottlenecks and other problem areas within the prescribed workflow to be more easily identified and solved, leading to even further improvements in efficiencies.