Document Capture: New Devices, New Strategies

by Debra Haverson

Paper and more paper. Even when they originate electronically, many documents that are essential to a business transaction somehow end up back on paper, whether it's for signatures, approvals, annotations, edits or official records. The question remains: How do you collaborate across organizational and geographical boundaries with content that has a physical state?

The answer is still document imaging, but this technology has some new wrinkles, mainly in the combination of new devices and new types of software that use the Web. These tools can eliminate the inconvenience and inherent limitations of physical documents in a world where multiple locations and multiparty decision-making are now the norm.

The case studies in this article illustrate how various organizations capture documents and bring them into Web-accessible repositories. The latest automatic indexing, intelligent routing and text-recognition capabilities have enabled organizations to share documents affordably while gaining big payoffs in efficiency.

E-Business Icon Adopts Imaging

Legal professionals everywhere still rely heavily on paper documents. The legal department at Cisco Systems, the San Jose-based provider of networking solutions, was no exception — until recently.

Cisco had been sending signed paper contracts to an outsourced service provider that scanned and stored images on CD so they could be uploaded to an Oracle database back at Cisco. This approach cost $50 to $60 per contract, by Cisco's estimate, and there was a two-week delay before employees had access to these documents. All work-in-progress and nondisclosure agreements remained in paper formats.

Cisco hoped to cut costs by bringing imaging in house, but the initiative's main focus was on improving customer service. "Our [imaging] initiative is designed to integrate with all downstream systems so we're delivering against what the contract says," says Cisco analyst Jeff Ghielmetti. "One of the biggest drives right now is automating the process so that all the terms and conditions are going to the right place."

Ghielmetti says the initiative involves electronic acceptance, contract management and data entry, and it will link to existing workflows so staff attorneys can make sure that all employees have accurate information from the final contracts.

The legal department had already purchased and installed Document Centre 440 digital copiers from Xerox, Stamford, CT, but it discovered that by adding scanning functionality and low-cost document management software, it could make contracts available much more quickly on the corporate intranet.

In June 2001, Cisco's legal department implemented Xerox's DocuShare Web-based content repository and FlowPort capture and image routing software. The first project was bringing the finished contracts online, and since last June, the department has brought more than 100,000 pages of documentation online almost instantly without the help of outsourced service providers. Cisco projects a savings of $262,000 for the legal department over two years, and the new approach has also eliminated 37 steps formerly required in handling a contract.

Once this imaging technology was in place, Cisco's legal department developed a second application to capture and route work in progress, including pending contracts and related faxes and correspondence. FlowPort's routing capabilities are used to keep collaborators in sync with the latest content. The software lets users create document coversheets with barcode-like "DataGlyphs" that specify all e-mail and repository destinations for scanned images. Users can also fill in generic forms available at each Document Centre by checking boxes for widely used network destinations. Ghielmetti says this approach offers significant efficiencies over the old approach of sending photocopies, faxes and e-mail attachments.

In a third application, Cisco's legal department is using the DocuShare/FlowPort system to scan and intranet-publish nondisclosure agreements — documents formerly stored in physical binders. "The best part is that it makes all of these contracts available to everyone on the intranet," Ghielmetti says.

Cisco's legal department spent 90 days perfecting these applications on one of eight Document Centres before adding the applications to the other machines. Six of these Document Centres are distributed throughout Cisco's San Jose campus. The department plans to extend these applications so that legal offices in Toronto and Sydney, Australia, can contribute documents to the intranet.

In addition to the $14,000 cost for each digital copier, Cisco licenses the two software products and receives service and support for $597 per month on a 36-month contract. Adding scanning costs approximately $2,000. The department spent approximately $31,000 integrating its existing legal contracts database with the Xerox solution. Other costs for PC servers and Adobe software totaled $21,000.

Ghielmetti is now developing yet another application, this one aimed at using FlowPort's routing capabilities to generate contracts automatically and with greater standardization of terms and conditions. Ghielmetti envisions the contract negotiator or the customer responding to questions on a computerized questionnaire. Based on the responses, the solution will pull and adapt standard legal clauses and will generate a Word document that serves as the first draft of the contract for use in negotiation. This will yield customized contracts, but with a high degree of consistency.

FlowPort will become useful as the contract, often on paper, goes back and forth between Cisco and the customer. Ghielmetti says the system will provide more than just version control.

"If I know the structure and the clauses in the original document, and I know by OCR what's in the new document," he says, "I can do an electronic comparison of the two documents and automatically pull out anything that's different . This means I can post deviations to clauses automatically."

Of course, this process would be even more efficient if everything occurred electronically, but Cisco is realistic about the fact that the legal world still doesn't show readiness to adopt electronic signature technology. In the meantime, it can use imaging technology to streamline the paper-dependent processes.

Law Firm Captures to Cut Cost

It's not just a matter of signatures and legal concerns: Derek Wyszynski, director of information technology at the Seed Intellectual Property Law Group of Seattle, has another theory about why lawyers love their paper.

"Law firms are usually the last to accept new technology and workflow," he contends. "The reason is that billable time is the commodity. If you lower the time it takes to do a task, [the fear is that] you're actually lowering your revenue."

But today's clients scrutinize bills more closely and protest administrative charges for such things as photocopying and faxing. "Clients are intelligent, and they know technology," says Wyszynski. "Most of these initiatives with e-collaboration and document imaging are client-driven."

Rather than worry about reduced administrative fees, Seed embraced imaging to improve customer service and drive internal cost savings. Since the firm's lawyers began accessing documents such as patent files more than a decade ago, electronic collaboration has reduced the long-term cost of doing business.

To reduce its internal reliance on paper, Seed Law Group had already invested "hundreds of thousands of dollars," according to Wyszynski, in iManage WorkSite for Legal, a collaborative content management system from iManage, Foster City, CA. Yet for security and other reasons, the firm's large corporate clients in fields such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences and engineering still preferred to send documents such as patent and trademark applications in paper format.

To maximize productivity for these documents, Seed decided to scan-enable the firm's digital copiers so they could capture the originals and make them available anywhere through iManage. Since the firm already had ImageRunner digital copiers from Canon, Lake Success, NY, it naturally chose well-integrated scanning technology from eCopy, Nashua, NH. The eCopy suite includes a small-format touchscreen panel that attaches directly to the ImageRunner. This screen lets users preview and replace poor images, and it also provides simple, menu-driven selections for copying, e-mailing and/or exporting images to back-end repositories such as Lotus Domino.Doc, PC Docs or, in this case, iManage.

"We previously had to photocopy these documents, but now we scan them instead," Wyszynski says. "Once they're scanned, we're able to use iManage's Web access so the client and the attorney can work on these documents in almost a virtual file room as opposed to faxing things back and forth."

Content management provides a secure way to collaborate electronically, with less confusion related to version control and back-and-forth e-mailing of bandwidth-hungry attachments. Documents are indexed and searchable by client name and matter number. Clients log in remotely with a password to view documents for which they have access, often after receiving an e-mail with a hyperlink to the document.

The new approach has brought enormous efficiencies. Upon receipt, documents are scanned on one of two eCopy-enabled ImageRunners at the law firm's headquarters. While originals are sent to a file room, the document images are immediately available via a Web browser to all those with access rights. A desktop OCR module is also available that can turn images into editable text; users can then cut and paste text and create new documents with content from multiple source files.

With two scan-enabled digital copiers (out of six ImageRunners deployed at Seed), the firm now captures 500 to 800 documents per day, and many of these are lengthy patent filings and other legal documents that can be up to 300 pages long. A project planned for this summer will integrate iManage with the records management application that keeps track of the physical documents retained in storage. This system will allow users to locate originals without having to access a separate system.

In an unexpected bonus, Seed also found that eCopy provided a convenient, low-cost alternative for electronic billing. The firm already had a solution for creating printed bills meeting highly customized client specifications. To duplicate this solution with an electronic billing system with the same degree of customization would be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, the firm scans all printed bills and stores them as PDFs. Most clients still prefer conventional billing, but electronic bills or duplicates can now be provided via e-mail upon request.

"[Electronic billing] may be the way to go in a year or so, but [in the short-term] this is a much more cost-effective way to get basically the same thing," Wyszynski says.

Soon after implementation, this solution also helped Seed meet an important deadline for filing a patent on February 28, 2001, the day Seattle was rocked by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that shut down phones, fax lines, the airport and all overnight mail delivery. To meet the postmark deadline, the firm scanned the document and e-mailed it to a partner firm in Spokane, WA, where it was printed and postmarked on time.

Distribution Speeds Claims

Every executive wants to hear that "the new solution is a 500 percent improvement over the old way of doing things." That's how one claims processor at Federated Mutual Insurance, Owatonna, MN, summed up the company's new distributed capture solution.

The company's old method of gathering clinic, doctor, HCFA and other documents, involved burning CDs of document images, mailing them to the main office in Owatonna and then exporting the files to the life insurance unit's Optika Acorde system or the property and casualty unit's DocuCorp Documanage system.

Today, Federated Mutual uses a distributed imaging system to consolidate 10,000 to 12,000 images per day from five sites — two in Owatonna and one each in Indianapolis, Des Moines IA and Tampa, FL. Images reach the central processing site in minutes rather than a few days. The system speeds processing of claims and eliminates the labor and expense of compiling and shipping CDs.

The distributed imaging system was implemented beginning last summer when the remote sites installed an eCapture and ecNet document capture system from Minneapolis-based Captovation. These sites are connected to the central servers over a virtual private network, and Captovation's ecAutofile product and custom macros are used to automatically index and store images based on barcoded information from batch cover sheets. If ecAutofile is unable to process the document, a manual module called ecIndex finishes the task.

With this process running smoothly, the company has begun implementing Captovation's ecImport module, which will bring faxes and image-based copies of electronic documents into the automated capture picture. Through the remainder of 2002, the company expects to apply workflow functionality gradually so that copies of documents generated in ordinary desktop applications can be automatically brought into the document management system through ecImport.

"We [see electronic document capture] as something that a lot of different areas of our company will want, and we're trying to have the tools there if they need them," says Randy Bennett, senior programmer/analyst.

Bennett describes the solution as very affordable. The company already needed to replace the scanners at each remote site, so it purchased Canon DR-5020s at a cost of $7,500 each. The Captovation capture software, including server licenses for ecAutoFile, ecNet and ecImport, and concurrent client licenses for ecNet and ecIndex, cost approximately $25,000, plus expenses for creating custom macros, integration and system testing.

Bennett acknowledges the claims processor's "500 percent improvement" comment may be a bit of an exaggeration, but he says the investment has certainly paid off in terms of improved customer service and reduced cost and labor.