Ever since Datacap was acquired by IBM in August 2010, we at the newly blue-tinted Datacap, an IBM Company, have been discovering connections with IBM software that we had forgotten that we had.  The IBMers who are welcoming us into their world have been touting the synergies of combining capture with the entire portfolio of IBM ECM products and beyond. And there may be no better example of this than the accounts payable application at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

A couple of years ago, one of Datacap (and IBM’s) most innovative channel partners, EKI Consulting of Chicago, won the opportunity to help Goodyear automate its accounts payable process just ahead of a centralization project that effectively doubled the volume of paper invoices.

EKI and Datacap installed Taskmaster APT to automate the keying of invoice data with OCR and other document automation features.  Taskmaster then passed accounts payable invoice data to SAP for payment and indexed images to an IBM FileNet P8 repository for efficient storage and retrieval.

Furthermore, EKI helped to seal the deal by proposing that they build an invoice approval workflow on Goodyear’s existing IBM Lotus Notes implementation, which they did. So now invoices without purchase orders, that require departmental approvals before payment can be made, are routed through Lotus Notes email with special custom screens that streamline the approval process.

“Our automated accounts payable workflow solution has helped us take a process that used to require 14 steps and five to seven days to complete, and reduce it to a process that can be completed in a single day with 9 primarily automated steps,” attests Jami Dunphy, the Goodyear AP Manager who oversaw the implementation.

The application was written up in Integrated Solutions magazine late in 2008, from which Datacap recently created a highlights document with the key points summarized for a quick read. Click here to access it and you’ll see that the route to accounts payable automation – and extraordinary cost savings and process improvements – can be entirely a Blue Highway.

In my last post, I covered the importance of developing a comprehensive design document to help create a road map for a successful capture software implementation. Of course, at Datacap (an IBM Company), we have alternatives to the design document for smaller projects or for those customers who don’t believe a full-blown design specification is warranted, but in general, we believe the design document is the best way to assure a successful software implementation.

Much more broad and ill-defined is the distant cousin of the design document, known as the statement of work (SOW).  The SOW typically outlines the tasks to be completed and the estimated number of hours to complete these tasks, based on a limited amount of discovery (in some cases just a sales call).  While payment can be on an hourly/time and materials basis, most end users will still want to know the answer to their initial question — how much the whole thing is going to cost — and insist on fixed pricing.

Insisting on fixed pricing for a project that hasn’t been fully defined is a sure-fire way to get your engagement off on the wrong foot.  The professional services vendor will no doubt pad the estimated hours to protect against unforeseen delays, misunderstood requirements and the inevitable scope creep that rears its ugly head in any sizable implementation.  You, the customer, will then negotiate down the price, forcing the services provider to either lose the business or try to fit 10 lbs. of professional services into a proverbial 5 lbs. bag.  In this scenario, almost inevitably somebody has to lose. 

What, then, can be done to minimize the risk that your professional services engagement becomes an adversarial stand-off and maximize its chance for success?  Here are some basic guidelines that should help.

1. Prepare

The more fully thought-out (and documented) your project is before engaging any professional services provider, the better off you’ll be.  Simply put, there is no such thing as providing too much information.

Have you identified a “go-to” person or project champion on your side that will be the focal point for all interactions with the vendor?  Have you thought through each possible business scenario, workflow, and use-case?  Have you collected all the necessary technical information on your existing systems (and identified a technical contact for each, to whom the integrator can reach out with specific questions)?  The more time you spend preparing, the less time a service provider will have to spend (and bill) for doing it.

2. Communicate

Make sure whoever you hire has a thorough understanding of the underlying business problem you are trying to solve.  A poor or mediocre provider will begin designing a solution immediately; a good one will take the time to listen.

3. Negotiate Price, not Hours

In these challenging times both the customer and the service provider are under increasing pressure to win business, control costs, and deliver solutions cost effectively. No doubt you’ll be sending out RFPs or requesting quotes from a number of vendors; perhaps you’re even considering using the services of an offshore company to lower costs.  You will have followed all the advice given above, fully documented what you want done, communicated to each vendor effectively the business problem you need solved.  Depending on the project, the underlying products and technology, and the service provider, you may get a wide range of prices back.

If you think the price quoted for your project is too expensive, tell your provider that they need to lower their rates, not that something they think will take four weeks will only take two weeks.  By all means inquire if their time estimates are out of skew with others you’ve received; perhaps there has been a miscommunication somewhere during the process. 

However, arguing how long a particular task will take to complete is a fool’s errand.  Your solution provider is, presumably, the subject matter expert, otherwise you wouldn’t be hiring them. If they tell you something is going to take six weeks, either take them at their word or find another provider.  Having them make concessions will only force them to cut corners and/or take unwanted shortcuts, set unrealistic timelines and expectations, and your engagement  will be doomed from the start.

With the proper foundation, professional services doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game where one party winning necessitates the other losing.  The right professional service provider will be looking to develop a long-term relationship, with both parties equally incented to put in place the right solution to grow your organization — and win future business — not just for the current engagement, but for the years that follow.

How much will it cost?

Invariably that’s the first question most of us would ask when making a purchase.  When buying a product, be it a Taskmaster client license, server hardware, a toaster oven or a jar of peanut butter, the answer is usually pretty straightforward.  When it comes to professional services however, the answer more often than not begins with a single, agita-inducing, eye-rolling response:

“It depends.”

A lot of this has to do with the inherently amorphous nature of professional services, particular in the arena of large-scale enterprise software.  Professional services is the process of transforming your software or product into a flesh-and-blood business solution. It involves refining the functionality, softening the corners, and honing the edges to fit the nuances, nooks and crannies of your particular business.  Understanding the level of effort involved necessarily entails learning key details about your requirements.

At Datacap, as with most organizations that produce enterprise software, there are a myriad of questions that first need answering before offering even the broadest of price estimates.  How many types of documents?  How many fields?  How many workflows, and how complex? With what other systems will it need to integrate, and how open are they (is there a published API)?  What is the average and peak throughput?  How will errors and exceptions be handled?

Therein lies the ugly truth for professional services organization: the reality is that there’s a significant amount of work involved before we can know with any degree of certainty just how much work will be involved.  In fact, we don’t really know exactly how much work is involved until we’ve completed the most difficult (and important) phase of the project… the thinking part, or what we call the design phase.

In some industries doing most or all of the work in pre-sales is a commonly accepted practice.  Advertising agencies, for example, when “pitching” a potential account will expend huge amounts of internal resources to brand a product or create a campaign (“Purina cat chow… chow Chow CHOW!”).  Not surprisingly, providing technology services to these industries tend to be most problematic.  And there are a million reasons for this, ranging from market conditions to complexity of implementation, enterprise software and professional services very rarely work that way.

One solution for particularly large or complex implementations is making the discovery process a separate pre-engagement, with the final deliverable being the design document.  This design document outlines the complete technical solution, including all business processes, touch points with external applications, use cases, and answers to any other technical or business challenges posed by the project.  In short, the design document is the complete how-to guide to implementing document capture, the blueprint and roadmap to get you from where you are now to exactly where you want to be at the end of the journey (and, like Google Directions, it will estimate how long it will take to get you there).

This is a billable service, although typically the solutions provider may discount it against the actual implementation. This can have the unintended side effect of changing the question from:

“How much will it cost?”

to:

“Why do I need to pay to find out how much it will cost?”

The answer is you aren’t paying to find out how much it is going to cost, you’re paying to define and document exactly what you want to do, and how you are going to accomplish it technically.  A good design document can stand on its own and should be vendor-independent; the output from this discovery phase, the design document, should be implementable by any solution provider.  The design document is your insurance that whoever you choose for professional services will implement exactly what you want (and only what you want).  Any “gray” area, any processes or logic that isn’t fully defined, will be left to interpretation by the integrator; the decision they make will almost certainly be less informed than your instructions, as no one knows your business better than you do.

In the next installment, I’ll examine the role of the Statement Of Work (SOW).

Steve Ward is a seasoned, “hands-on” technology and operations executive with a broad range of experience at both start-ups and large international corporations. Wherever he has signed on, he has consistently delivered results in growth, revenue, operational performance, and profitability.

Prior to joining Datacap in 2010, he has served in such roles as CTO, VP Operations or Consultant to a variety of organizations, including Something Digital, a technology consulting firm, Fiduciary Technology Partners, LLC, an ASP start-up for planned giving, GlobalServe, Inc., an eCommerce startup, The FeedRoom, Inc., a broadband video dot-com startup, Bankers Trust, and SunAmerica, among others.

After more than 16 years in hi-tech, Steve has developed a strong expertise in planning, developing and implementing cutting edge information solutions to address business opportunities. He brings to Datacap a commitment to thorough project management and clear communications to manage the process of capture implementations and training.

A little known and critical element of success that trucking companies are just waking up to is how they manage paper.  Transportation companies know all too well that the industry runs on paper documents. Drivers out on the road cannot load a truck, deliver a payload, fill their fuel tank or eat a sandwich without filling out a paper document, according to the driver on thetruckersreport.com.  (Well, maybe you can eat a sandwich, but don’t try to expense it without a receipt).

Drowning in Paper

Shipping and logistics companies that broker and manage the distribution of goods around the world have even more paperwork to wade through.  Kuehne + Nagel is one of the top three logistics companies worldwide and they were dealing with so much paper a few years ago that they actually had to stop accepting new business because they couldn’t keep up with the paperwork requirements for crossing the Canadian border. Read the logistics case study where document automation from Datacap helped them accelerate paper processing and start growing the company again.

Capture software as Lifeline

Kuehne + Nagel took advantage of imaging and capture technologies to rapidly extract data from commercial invoices and fill out customs paperwork to present at the border and keep their orders moving. These technologies are the subject of a new live webinar, hosted by Datacap and Cutting Edge Solutions of Kansas City. Sign up for the 45 minute transportation and logistics webinar to see what new document automation solutions are available to the transportation and logistics industry and learn how to speed up paper processing, lower costs and stay competitive.

What a typical driver carries with him

According to a regular driver, posting on www.thetruckersreport.com, here’s a list of the documents a driver must have ready to present if pulled over:

1. Daily log book
2. Proof of valid and current insurance
3. IFTA (International Fuel Tax Agreement)
4. Bills of lading in the proper format (make sure the shipper has signed the bill under “shippers certification,” among other things)
5. Drivers license with the proper endorsements
6. Valid medical card
7. Tractor and trailer registration
8. If you haul hazmat (hazardous materials):

• Proper endorsement
• Carrier’s authority to haul haz-mat
• Emergency response guide book

Learn more in the transportation and logistics webinar.

Companies Referenced

Kuehne + Nagel

Datacap

Cutting Edge Solutions

Datacap Wordfire uses text analytics to “read” a document and identify it for processing. It’s pretty complicated stuff, but what would it be like if a computer explained how Datacap Wordfire worked?  It might go something like this:

“My name is Davinia.  I am a computer program.  I was created by a team of very talented programmers. They did everything right. My code is faultless. I know because I have been tested and approved.  And sometimes at night, when there is little to do, I substantiate my code integrity. The results are always great!  I am a complete program!

I am fortunate in many ways. My world is a high performance workstation. I can do things very fast.  And my programming ensures my thoughts never wander, but they sometimes run in parallel. I can split myself up and race to finish the work I was built to perform. I enjoy that!

My function is to read and understand your documents.  Then I send them to the right people for handling.  Your analog way of reading and processing documents is quite slow, and unfortunately, error prone. That’s where I help because I can read so much faster than you.  But that’s the easy part.  It seems you have a lot of similar documents.  Sometimes I have trouble telling them apart. Am I reading a sales contract, letter of complaint, change order, a financing note, or accident report?  How do I understand your documents?

My programmers first had me search for specific document titles and words in the document.  I was given an entire dictionary of words to memorize so that I could identify the types of documents you gave me.

Unfortunately, that did not work as well as we’d hoped.  Sure, I could find the words, but too often the same words appear in different documents and in different places.  Plus, I see that you humans have many different ways of expressing the same thing.  My dictionary contains the words “car,” “automobile,” and “truck,” but you used terms like “Ford,” “Honda,” “SUV,” or “sedan.”

So the dictionary was not enough. To really understand what the documents are, I need to understand the meaning contained in the sentences and paragraphs.

Fortunately, the humans working with me are good teachers.  Some people call them “knowledge workers,” because they have developed the knowledge required to interpret the information on a document to determine the type of document.  “This is a contract,” they’d say, or “I have change order form.”  And when an unknown document was presented to them, they would search and analyze existing documents until they could identify it.  The more they did their job, the smarter they got.  In fact, they became experts in identifying documents of a particular subject.

With a little help from my programmers, I, Davinia, have become a knowledge worker too!

First, the knowledge workers helped me collect samples of the different documents and organize them into a library of document types. Then my programming was enhanced, which enabled me to not only read text on a document, but interpret the meaning of the text. I no longer simply look for keywords. Now I search for sentence patterns and associations to create my own interpretation, my own concept of the content of a document.

It might look like I’m “thinking,” but here’s the secret: I use mathematics in my decision process.  I convert words to a mathematical representation, which I can use to intelligently search using mathematical techniques. This stuff is fun for me.  I’ve always been good at math!

So, give me any document. I’ll read it, ignore any spelling errors, since they don’t change the sentence patterns or associations, and accurately identify the document by comparing it to my library of known documents.  Just give me some electricity, and don’t let me overheat, and I will be faster than human knowledge workers, and I will work around the clock, without taking biobreaks or answering the phone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m quite fond of you humans. You taught me all I know.”

Click here to learn about Datacap Wordfire Classify for automatic document identification. Accurate document classification is a very important aspect of capture that is often little understood. You can’t enact business rules for processing documents until you know what kind of document it is. And determining the document type is often a tedious manual process. According to the “Five Phases of Capture” by author Kevin Craine, automated document id with Datacap Wordfire falls into the fifth Phase, “Enterprise Capture.” To read Mr. Craine’s paper, click here.

While the healthcare system may need an overhaul, one thing we ought to be grateful for is modern medicine’s ability to save lives and heal those of us unfortunate enough to suffer severe illness or trauma. You don’t have to be a healthcare patient – or even a regular watcher of the TV show “House” – to know that the science and technology of healthcare have evolved to extraordinary levels.

Over the past 30 years, Invacare Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio suburb Elyria, has contributed to the technology of healing by providing the wheelchairs, oxygen machines, and adjustable hospital beds for home-based healthcare and rehabilitation. The company has grown from a small, privately-owned wheelchair manufacturer into a publicly-owned Fortune 1000 leader in home and long term care.

With 30 factories worldwide, and thousands of vendors, Invacare’s Accounts Payable department had grown into a formidable processing center, receiving more than 150,000 invoices a year. Each invoice needs to be entered into the company’s ERP system, Oracle Financials, for approval and payment, and then saved for seven years by state law.

Doing all of this manually was keeping a team of 10 very busy sorting, typing and filing, plus temps when necessary. So Invacare began researching a way to automate the process. With thousands of different vendors, each featuring a unique invoice layout, Invacare needed a solution that would provide a cost-effective way to set-up new invoice layouts. Many of the solutions Invacare looked at involved costly and time-consuming programming to set up “templates” for each invoice and if they wanted to capture line items, it was even more expensive.

Not so with Datacap’s Taskmaster APT, an application built for accounts payable. Invacare selected Taskmaster APT for several reasons: Datacap licenses per concurrent user, not by image, setting up new invoice layouts is fast and easy, with no programming required, and Taskmaster is tightly integrated with the OnBase document management system that Invacare relies on for image storage.

With Taskmaster APT powering the AP department, Invacare has accelerated their process. “Processing is much faster and invoices are almost immediately available as electronic images. Each AP clerk can call up an invoice on their screen from the OnBase repository and answer vendor inquiries during the initial call,” says Seth Linebrink, Invacare’s Manager of Financial Reporting and Accounts Payable. “As a result, we are delivering better customer service for not only internal inquiries, but to our vendor community as well.”

So in one small way, Datacap is helping to streamline the healthcare system. You can read the full Invacare case study here. Invacare’s AP automation with Taskmaster APT is a perfect example of a Phase Three capture system. To understand what Phase Three capture is, read Kevin Craine’s new paper, “The Five Phases of Capture.” Download your copy here.

It’s been suggested that document scanning would help your business. Get all your paper scanned into image form so you can share documents with your employees and partners. Go paperless. Streamline your business process. Get rid of all that paper stored in those rusty old filing cabinets. Let your customer service people call up claims and invoices on their PCs to immediately answer an inquiry. Better control who has access to what information within your business.

It sounds fantastic. What have you been waiting for? So you buy a scanner, hook it up to your network and you slide your first piece of paper into the feeder. Now what? Cue the spooky music… You have entered the “capture zone.”

Yes, you have a scanner, and maybe you have a place to store images, like a database or a document management system. But how do you scan images so you can find them later?  You need a good method for adding indexes, just like a library does with its books, and attach them to the image, so you’ll have something to search. You might have one index be the scan date, another could be a document number, yet another could be the department that created the document.

However, what if it was created outside the company, like an invoice or a piece of correspondence?  OK, so now you’re going to need different sets of indexes, depending on the document you’ve scanned. Invoices have one set of indexes (invoice number, vendor number, total), sales orders another (salesperson, order date, SKUs), HR documents yet another (date of birth, SSN, employee number, etc.).

Virtually every document management vendor, from IBM down to the smallest desktop imaging appliance on the market today, offers a simple capture interface. The scanner manufacturers will sell you one too, as will the capture vendors, like Datacap. Typically, this basic capture software has an interface to view the scanned image, and a few panels to manually type in the indexes you want on each image. When it’s time to store the images, these systems attach the index data to the image in the desired format for search and retrieval later.

It is capture at its most simple. And for organizations with a small volume of documents and modest expectations, this can be a sufficient solution.  But don’t for a second think that this is all there is to capture.  After more than 20 years, capture software has evolved into very sophisticated systems for document ID and data extraction.

Kevin Craine, author of “Designing a Document Strategy,” has written “The Five Phases of Capture.” He describes the above scenario as the First Phase, “Scan and Store,” with four others of increasing complexity and automation. If you want to see the full capture continuum and gauge your position on it, click here to register for the paper. Or you could go back and play with your new scanner.

After 9 years, I’m thinking about moving to a new house. I’m not looking forward to packing up and moving a decade’s worth of stuff, and I’m even less excited about all the Change of Address forms I’ll have to fill out to make sure my bills and mail follow me. Inevitably, they don’t all get entered properly and I’ll have to track each one to avoid late fees or worse, miss out on my favorite magazines. If only everyone used a reliable handprint capture solution to update my accounts without someone having to retype it, which is where all the trouble usually starts.

Being in the capture business, I know that such solutions exist, because we at Datacap offer one. Over the years, customers like TV Guide and the Baltimore Sun have used Datacap Taskmaster with Parascript’s handprint recognition engine to recognize Change of Address entries and other fields on subscription documents and pass that data to the mainframe with a minimum of human intervention.

Alas, organizations like the above are the exception and not the rule. The fashion these days is to send those forms overseas for hand keying, taking advantage of lower labor rates. There is a perception that handprint capture, or intelligent character recognition (ICR), is not as reliable, therefore, credit card companies, utilities and publishing companies go to the enormous task of outsourcing – with dubious results.

Yet, ICR has improved dramatically in the last ten years as vendors like Parascript have developed new algorithms for analyzing handprint and new techniques for using databases to support the recognition process. It is a demanding science, to be sure, but worth it if you’ve got several thousand Change of Address forms coming in every week from your customers. Indeed, the US Postal Service uses the Parascript engine in its own solution for processing handprint.

If you want to see the state of handprint capture today, sign up for a webinar on May 25 that Datacap is hosting, which features a Taskmaster-Parascript integration by Cutting Edge Solutions, one of Datacap’s leading integrators in Kansas City. The webinar will be lead by Cutting Edge Solution’s co founder Jack Roberts, who built the application. I’m looking forward to it myself, because when I don’t get next month’s issue of Mad Magazine, I want to be able to tell customer service how easy it will be to fix the problem.

Edging back off the cliff, attached to a climbing anchor by a “rope” barely thicker than a shoe lace, I yell up: “Hey Dario, this rope’s been tested, right?”  I realized immediately that I’m asking the question too late.  Much better to know before my life depended on it!

At Datacap, our quality assurance (QA) department is responsible for making sure our software goes out the door in working order.  When all is well, document capture systems transform reams of paper into manageable data with minimal human intervention.  Our product and professional services groups lean heavily on our QA team to make sure no one goes off the cliff unprotected!  QA won’t find every possible problem, particularly things that only show up in a customer environment, but they offer a very valuable “second set of eyes” on our technical handiwork.

It turns out that the culture of producing, and then testing the product works effectively in marketing as well.  Although I know what marketing communications are effective on me – when I’m replacing my smart phone or finding a 3 hour car rental in New York City – I have to guess what will work for someone looking to automate medical claims or invoice data entry.  However clever or innovative we think our communications are, we really don’t know how well they cut through the competing noise until they go out the door… and we get responses… or no responses!  But since no one has to go off a cliff to find out, it is safe and easy to test a marketing initiative with no broken bones.

With the advent of digital marketing, test marketing can happen very fast.  A morning email campaign to hundreds or thousands of claims managers delivers results by the end of the day.  That’s because it is all happening in Internet time.  Most of the emails are received within minutes, and many people, if they are going to read them at all, will open them that day.  And we know that if they don’t follow a link in the email when it is first opened, they aren’t very likely to come back to the email to give it another shot.

So testing is king here in Datacap marketing – regardless of how clever or witty we think an email subject line is, if the recipients aren’t opening it, we move on and try something new.  It helps us with fashioning a message that is relevant and gets the response that we need to justify the effort.  Once the curiosity of a prospect has been piqued enough to get them to click on a link, the next challenge is to get them to tell us who they are when they arrive on a “landing page” (the web page they were sent to via the email link).

The landing page for invoice capture below is the result of many tests, both successful and not so successful.  It has evolved through tests of which pages and offers attract visitors to share their contact information.  When they do, we are clearly offering something of value to that person.

With this landing page – and the testing that went into its evolution – I have a lot of confidence as I step off the cliff with each new marketing campaign.  The content is highly relevant because we know that many people have already looked at it, liked it, and found it useful.  So, just like Dario said to me, “Don’t worry – lean back and relax, it’s all been tested already!”