Production imaging overview
This chapter provides an overview of the production imaging space and an introduction to IBM Production Imaging Edition, which is a comprehensive product for managing the entire document imaging life cycle. This chapter focuses mainly on the advanced document capture component of the product, which is provided by IBM Datacap Taskmaster Capture (also referred to as Taskmaster).
This chapter includes the following sections:
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Important: This book focuses on Taskmaster because it is a new addition to the IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) product family. For detailed information about the other components and products included in Production Imaging Edition, see the following IBM Redbooks publications:
•IBM FileNet P8 Platform and Architecture, SG24-7667
•IBM FileNet Content Manager Implementation Best Practices and Recommendations, SG24-7547
•Introducing IBM FileNet Business Process Manager, SG24-7509
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1.1 The business document problem and approach to its solution
Organizations today face many challenges in efficiently managing the documents they need to conduct their business. They have the perennial paper problem and the ever-increasing electronic document problem. One challenge is to control all types of media that are required to conduct businesses. Another challenge is to ensure continuity, consistency, and longevity across these media over the entire life cycle of the business processes. The approach to solving these problems is a production imaging solution.
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Tip: If you are already aware of the problems associated to managing business documents and want to jump directly to their solution and learn more about the Production Imaging Edition product offering, skip this section and go to 1.2, “Introduction to Production Imaging Edition” on page 10.
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1.1.1 Paper everywhere
The advent of such innovations as email, the web, instant messaging, and social media has resulted in more efficient communication and a significant reduction in the need to print information. Despite these technological advancements, many companies still rely heavily on paper to conduct a large part of their business.
Organizations use paper for the following common reasons among others:
•Historical. The organization has to deal with existing forms and documents and has no say in the decision to convert these hardcopy forms and documents into electronic formats. Sometimes, the number of existing forms and documents make it unrealistic to undergo such a conversion process.
•Legal. In some cases, legislation has not kept pace with new technology and still refers specifically to having records on paper (which holds probative value). In other cases, new laws take into account electronic media, but have not been challenged in court yet, which means that the safe option is to keep using paper.
•Practical. The low-tech portability of paper makes it the best option to reach customers anywhere, irrespective of affordability, access to infrastructure, technical dependencies, or administrative boundaries. For example, many companies that otherwise rely on electronic means of communication for marketing purposes still send correspondence by post to confirm important transactions that require the attention and signature of the customer. Similarly, many customers still prefer to send their official correspondence through registered mail to be tracked by a third party with the expectation that it will be deemed an official record.
•Technical. Paper is the ultimate “systems integration technology,” a variant of the previous reasons. It is common to hear that the best way to communicate with another department in the same company or administration is to print the information and send it out. This is especially true in organizations where records keeping of inbound and outbound communication is available for mail, but not across incompatible business or ECM systems.
1.1.2 Business challenges posed by paper
If many businesses cannot do without paper altogether, dealing with paper still poses several challenges, as explained in this section.
For example, paper is expensive to store for the long term and to preserve under optimal conditions for business, legal, disaster (flood and fire), security, and safety reasons. Consider the costs incurred in maintaining shelf space, physical filing systems, and cabinets. Such costs also include robotics, temperature, and hygrometric control; fire and flood protection; and periodically verifying that the contents do not deteriorate over time or under heavy usage.
Paper is inefficient, time-consuming, inflexible, and expensive to manipulate in the course of conducting day-to-day business. For example, a home loan or credit card department might receive hundreds or thousands of applications from customers each day. These hard copy documents must be logged into their systems. In addition, the information on all these applications must be entered into the electronic loan processing systems of the department. Manually handling these applications are inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to human error.
As another example, for a particular document, you might have to go to the file cabinet, control who has clearance to access the document, track who has had physical access to it, and flag it as checked out. You might also have to make copies of the document to share with people working the case or project and write comments on the document to pass on to the next person in the process. You might also have to do all the other tasks that you have to do with such information in a business process.
In a call center, it might be inconceivable to operate this way. Still for many organizations, productivity and access speed were not as critical initially. However, they now find themselves in a situation where they can no longer afford to operate in this way as competitive pressures and volumes increase.
Physical documents are exposed to the human factor. For example, they can be more easily lost, misfiled, or misclassified and never recovered. Their contents can be misread and entered with errors. Contents can also be discovered or used beyond their authorized purpose. The consequences can be expensive for a business.
More organizations are concerned with compliance. They want to ensure that they preserve the right documents while discarding documents that are no longer needed for the business. They also want to ensure that they purge documents as required after a certain period, as mandated by law, such as in some European countries. Although records management systems have long been available to manage physical records, it is increasingly challenging to manage records efficiently as the volumes of records increase.
The information on physical documents is locked on paper, which does not lend itself to automation and verification. As a result, transcription errors spread, and original mistakes go undetected. Spelling variations and typographical errors in names and nomenclatures cannot be verified and corrected until late in the business process, which is more expensive to fix. Also the business process cannot be automatically driven by the data. Therefore, dedicated expensive labor is required to do the low-value activity of routing documents to the next person in the process.
1.1.3 Business challenges posed by electronic documents
In many cases, organizations now use electronic documents in their business processes. For some of these processes, especially those processes that include external cycles with customers and business partners, it is still difficult to implement a solution that relies on one type of electronic media from end to end.
For example, it is now common to exchange electronic documents in at least part of the processing of a mortgage loan, from application to closing. However, especially in the case of a brokerage company, the organization is bound by legal requirements for paper. Also, often it cannot impose too many constraints on its customers and the other parties involved, such as lenders and assessors. Therefore, the organization must accommodate many situations. It continues to accept the receipt of paper documents, which leads to the need to handle multiple types of media over the course of working on a mortgage loan.
The loan application goes through the following process:
•The initial loan application form on the web typically feeds into a business database. The form is used to generate an initial loan offer that is sent to a customer on paper or electronically as a PDF document.
•Preliminary contacts between the broker and the customer generate several email messages with attachments back and forth to each other.
•Many forms (disclosures, authorizations, estimates, and so on), typically in PDF are also exchanged. Signed copies must be captured, which leads to faxing or scanning documents that were generated electronically at first and then sent by email.
•The final loan settlement statement is signed. Each page is initialled by the customer at the formal closing meeting with the escrow officer. Then each page is scanned in and stored as the main document of record.
As you can see this process, although faster than if it were conducted entirely through paper and post, can be inefficient. It causes discontinuities in the media (from electronic text to paper to electronic image) and communication (email messages or faxes going in and out) over the life cycle of a given document. This challenge makes it difficult to ensure data consistency, control, and reconciliation with the business process and the transactions of the line of business (LOB) systems in-house.
Also, typically these documents must be archived over the long term in a final form. This form must ensure preservation of the formatting and contents across multiple generations of technologies without the need to use the original application that created it.
1.1.4 Solving the problem with production imaging
These challenges align precisely with the business objectives that many organizations hope to achieve with ECM systems, including production imaging. Figure 1-1 on page 8 shows a recent study conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)1 on business objectives in ECM systems.
Figure 1-1 Business objectives in ECM systems
Production imaging is about helping organizations to manage more efficiently the documents they need to conduct their operations and meet their business goals. It is a set of capabilities that rely on technologies to achieve the following objectives:
•Reduce or eliminate the external paper cycle as much as possible to limit or remove the need to print, copy, store, and manipulate paper, and ultimately reduce cost.
•Capture customer input straight at the source in virtual forms (such as self-service portals and electronic documents) to limit errors, reduce delays and unnecessary steps, optimize processes, and reduce labor.
•Integrate document processing systems and repositories with LOB systems to reduce the need for paper, to reduce errors and normalize data, and to minimize labor.
•Digitize paper documents to feed into internal business processes as early as possible. This objective allows sharing and optimizes the processing of documents downstream, while meeting the scalability and deployment requirements that are typical of large organizations.
•Automate scanning, classification, separation, and data extraction of paper documents to minimize the added labor cost of scanning operations.
•Automate the import and conversion of electronic documents and email messages by using the same infrastructure as the one used for paper scanning to benefit from the same data normalization and validation rules.
•Verify and normalize data against business rules and databases and reduce errors. These types of issues are always more expensive to fix after they spread downstream.
•Provide flexibility to distribute image-processing operations (from local, to departmental, to central) to use available resources or easily shift them (such as when dispatching resources in disaster areas for the insurance industry).
•Store, classify or file, and secure content to avoid losses, provide protection, enforce compliance, manage records, and enable sharing.
•Provide context intelligence to drive automation of the business process and reduce delays, streamlining the allocation of work.
•Automatically deliver data and documents to users in a context that is the most relevant to the business process, using business process management technology. In addition, balance work loads, track work items, and gather statistics to help manage and tune up the business processes and increase efficiency.
Many examples are available of practical goals that some of our customers have attained by implementing production imaging solutions.
For example, a university was able to dramatically cut costs and improve productivity and customer satisfaction. It freed up much of the storage space that was previously occupied by paper archives and streamlined the flow of information in the organization. In making these changes, the university saved significant time for their staff, enabling them to focus more on their priorities. They also improved customer service by providing faster access to customers’ correspondence.
In another example, a state tax department was able to improve its operations while providing jobs to residents of the state. It reduced the labor-intensive work that was needed in scan preparation and fixing data entry errors. It was able to double data entry productivity and achieve accurate reporting on operations and resource utilization. The department can now also access easily any tax return in the system. Of equal importance, the tax department can now use local labor and stimulate low income areas of the state by offering remote document processing positions.
As yet another example, a global logistics company reduced penalties and fines by processing shipping documents faster and meeting service level agreements. At the same time the company improved compliance with regulations and reduced overall processing costs and the number full-time employees.
As a final example, a healthcare insurance company achieved an average of 50% reduction in personnel required to process claims. The company also achieved faster turnaround times, a reduction in duplicate claims submitted, and increased accuracy in claim processing.
By implementing production imaging solutions, these organizations were able to solve many of their business document problems.
1.2 Introduction to Production Imaging Edition
IBM Production Imaging Edition is a comprehensive product that provides the capabilities to process and manage high volumes of image documents over their entire life cycle, throughout thousands of users in the enterprise. For the first time, a solution is available that provides extensive production imaging capabilities in a single, pre-integrated offering, from a single vendor.
Production Imaging Edition includes software that enables you to perform the following tasks:
•Capture documents and turn them into digital images, extract information from them, and insert images and metadata into a repository.
•Organize, secure, and manage document images.
•Create and maintain business processes and automatically route document images based on content, context, and user input.
•View, annotate, and redact document images from anywhere in the enterprise.
Production Imaging Edition and its add-on components address various imaging use cases, including integrations with business applications and customer information databases. You can use any type of business document, anywhere in the organization, from a central location, remote office, multifunction printer, fax machine, email system, or from the desktop of someone on the go. Then with no or minimal manual operations, you can enter it in the system so that it can be immediately processed by business users with maximum efficiency.
With Production Imaging Edition, efficiency is derived from extracting pertinent data from the source paper document to automatically classify, index, organize, and route the document to the appropriate people or to an automated processor. The data is extracted by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), barcodes, or other image technologies. When the source is electronic documents, such as email messages and attachments, add-on components automatically extract and convert the individual attachments to a format that is suitable for long-term preservation.
Production Imaging Edition also helps to ensure that the data is accurate (true to the original) and correctly formatted and normalized against your vendor database, client database, or purchase order system. It also helps to ensure that the data can be used reliably in the business process. This capability applies to imported electronic documents, providing data consistency and validation across all the types of media used for your business documents.
Production Imaging Edition provides business process automation and optimization tools to route the documents reliably and present them to users in a business context. With relevant supporting business data, processes can be automated against business rules, and when users are involved, they can make their business decisions quicker.
The ability to use a single viewing tool to display the various types of documents and formats that are typically in a dossier or case you are working on is an important feature of the Production Imaging Edition offering that improves user productivity. You do not have to work with the various office applications that are needed for each format. With this viewer, you can also annotate reliably documents for the next person and redact information that is not supposed to be shared outside your workgroup. Furthermore, with the viewer, users can manipulate large documents efficiently without having to wait for pages to display.
1.2.1 Components of the Production Imaging Edition offering
The Production Imaging Edition offering includes the following components in one solution:
IBM Datacap Taskmaster Capture
An advanced document capture software.
An advanced document capture software.
IBM FileNet Content Manager
ECM software.
ECM software.
IBM FileNet Business Process Manager (BPM) Tools
The business process management tools that are included in FileNet Content Manager.
The business process management tools that are included in FileNet Content Manager.
IBM Production Imaging Edition Viewer
A viewing, annotation, and redaction software.
A viewing, annotation, and redaction software.
Bulk Importer Tool (BIT)
A high-speed document ingestion software
A high-speed document ingestion software
IBM Datacap Taskmaster Capture
IBM Datacap Taskmaster Capture (Taskmaster) handles production-level digitization, data extraction, verification, indexing, and commitment of documents to back-end systems. It includes the following components:
•Server components to manage and serve the images that have been scanned or imported
•Thick and thin clients to handle user-attended tasks such as scanning, indexing, verification of metadata, and administration of users and security
•Rulerunner, which is a rule engine to execute unattended capture operations such as image cleanup, data extraction, lookup, redaction, and export of contents and metadata to back-end systems
•Configuration, reporting, and system monitoring tools
IBM FileNet Content Manager
IBM FileNet Content Manager constitutes the enterprise content repository of the production imaging solution. FileNet Content Manager stores, organizes, and circulates documents among users under the control of a business process (workflow). It includes the following components:
•Content Engine to provide the content repository and content management capabilities
•Process Engine to execute workflows
•IBM FileNet Workplace XT client to provide the interface for users to manage content and process work items that are circulated through business processes
IBM FileNet Business Process Manager Tools
IBM FileNet BPM Tools help to design, manage, and monitor business processes. This component includes the following tools:
•IBM FileNet Business Process Designer and Connector for Microsoft Visio, which enable the creation and update of business process definitions
•IBM FileNet Business Process Tracker, which enables the monitoring of business process instances
•IBM FileNet Business Process Simulator, which enables the simulation and validation of a process before placing it into production
•IBM FileNet Case Analyzer, which enables the gathering of business process statistics for analysis
•The ECM Widgets and the IBM Lotus® mashups, which enable customers to design their own paneled views
These tools are available through IBM FileNet Content Manager.
IBM Production Imaging Edition Viewer
The Production Imaging Edition Viewer provides extended capabilities to view, annotate, and redact PDF documents and other types of electronic documents without needing to have the native applications installed. Production Imaging Edition Viewer is based on Daeja ViewONE Pro.
Bulk Importer Tool
The Bulk Importer Tool (BIT) provides high-speed ingestion of documents into the content repository. The tool is delivered on the FileNet Content Manager distribution media.
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Tool delivery and use: At the time of writing this book, the BIT is delivered on the FileNet Content Manager media but is licensed for use through Production Imaging Edition.
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1.2.2 Taskmaster base and add-on components
In addition to the Taskmaster components included in Production Imaging Edition, Taskmaster offers add-on components to expand functionality and flexibility of your production image solution. These add-on components can be used through separate licenses of the Taskmaster software.
Taskmaster components and functions offered through Production Imaging Edition
Production Imaging Edition provides the functionality and components listed in Table 1-1 that are delivered in the Taskmaster base package. They include a set of sample applications that can be cloned and used as a base to configure your own application, providing you a head start in the process.
Table 1-1 Taskmaster base components
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Component name
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Functionality
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Taskmaster Server
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Manages and serves documents and executes Taskmaster workflow
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Taskmaster Rulerunner
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Executes processing rules on documents
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Taskmaster Web
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Provides a web interface for user-attended tasks and administration
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Taskmaster Client (thick)
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Provides a thick client interface for initiating user-attended tasks and administration
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Batch Pilot and Dot Edit
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Configures graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for thick clients
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Datacap Studio
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Configures and tests applications
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Flex Manager
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Configures data and document types for the Flex Capture sample application
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Application Manager
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Maintains a registry of applications
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RV2
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Reports on runtime activity
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NENU
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Monitors operations and automates recurring tasks
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Flex Capture sample application
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Processes documents with variable layouts
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Survey sample application
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Processes surveys
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1040EZ sample application
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Processes US tax returns
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Express sample application
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Scans and indexes documents remotely on the web
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Add-on components of Taskmaster
The add-on components address additional connectivity and scalability needs. They can also provide an imaging solution as close to turnkey as possible in specific functional areas. These components require additional licensing agreements.
Table 1-2 Taskmaster components subject to additional licensing
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Component name
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Functionality
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Rulerunner Enterprise
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Multithreading and enhanced Fingerprint services
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Connector for Email and Electronic Documents
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Imports email attachments from Exchange and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) mail servers and converts electronic documents
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Connector for OpenText LiveLink
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Exports document images and data to an OpenText Livelink repository
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Connector for EMC Documentum
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Exports document images and data to the EMC Documentum repository
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Connector for Microsoft SharePoint
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Exports document images and data to Microsoft SharePoint
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Connector for Rightfax
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Imports fax images from an OpenText RightFax server
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Accounts Payable Capture
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Solution to process invoices and similar documents
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Medical Claims Capture
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Solution to process US healthcare claim and explanation of benefits forms
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Getting the add-on components: Taskmaster includes all base and add-on components on its own distribution media. However, to use the add-on components, you must acquire the necessary additional licensing from IBM.
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1.2.3 The production imaging process
To understand the nature of the components included in Production Imaging Edition and how they fit together to meet the requirements of imaging use cases, you must understand the typical life cycle of a document in an imaging system. This life cycle usually consists of two phases: the precommittal process and the postcommittal process.
Precommittal process
From a document perspective, the precommittal process deals with the steps that take place before the creation of the document in an ECM repository. This process is handled by the Datacap Taskmaster Capture software in Production Imaging Edition.
At this stage, the document does not exist in the enterprise repository yet. Hence, its processing by business users, using the business process management infrastructure, has not started. The precommittal process is driven by the Taskmaster workflow and generally includes the following tasks:
•Scanning
•Image processing
•Separation and classification of images
•Data extraction
•Data validation
•Preparation for indexing
In the precommittal phase, the documents are collections (or batches) of independent pages. They cannot be manipulated and used as documents in the conventional sense by business users yet.
The pages are raster images straight from the scanner, or alternatively, native electronic documents, if they are imported. Their format is not necessarily the one you want to store in the ECM repository. This format is typically the file format that is most appropriate for image processing, for OCR or ICR and barcode. In certain situations, you might want to convert the format to a different format for long-term preservation or other needs.
During the precommittal phase, and depending on the requirements of your imaging operations and volumes, you typically dedicate Taskmaster users to this process for efficiency reasons. (These users are not technically ECM users.) They handle document scanning, data entry, verification, and processing exceptions.
Overall, the precommittal process must be as short as possible, occurring in minutes or hours at the most. The short time frame is necessary because the business document, as known by the ECM system, has not been created yet. Therefore, it has not been officially received and has no date of record, apart from the possible date stamp that might be used to endorse the document at scan time. From a business perspective, it is not optimal if the precommittal process takes too long, especially if it means delaying revenue. The longer it takes for the documents to progress through the precommittal phase, the longer the delay is to start the associated business processes.
Postcommittal process
The second phase, known as the postcommittal process, starts with the creation of the document in the ECM back-end system, FileNet Content Manager. It spans the entire life cycle of the document up to its disposal. During this phase, all the functionality of FileNet Content Manager, including content and business process management, can be used to the fullest extent.
At this stage, the document is now a conventional ECM document, and it consists of one to many pages, with searchable metadata that have been extracted from the pre-committal processing phase. The document is classified based on the document types that are defined in the content repository. It is typically filed in a folder structure that meets the business requirements. Documents can be searched for or randomly accessed by browsing. More typically in an imaging application, the documents are distributed to business users through work items that are circulated through a workflow.
Documents can be associated with a FileNet Content Manager workflow in one of two ways:
•The document initiates a new workflow instance upon entering the FileNet Content Manager system. The document gets attached to the new workflow.
•The document reconciles automatically with an already running workflow instance when specific conditions are met.
In addition to the document being attached to a workflow instance, the properties of the document can be transferred to the FileNet workflow data fields so that they can be used to automate the business processing logic. The document properties include the data that was captured in the precommittal phase by Taskmaster. For example, these properties can be used to evaluate routing conditions or the completeness of the data gathered or to interact with a rating or business rule engine.
In some cases, depending on business requirements, the document can be converted automatically to another format by using the FileNet Rendition Engine. It can be viewed, annotated, or redacted while it is being circulated and processed by users. Also functionality can be extended by adding licensing for IBM Case Manager when additional flexibility and collaboration are needed for processing collections of data and documents that belong together and require coordination.
The ECM Administrator declares users who are involved in the postcommittal business process as ECM users. The postcommittal process expands over the entire life cycle of the documents, possibly over years, until they are purged from the system based on business requirements, rules, and regulations.
Figure 1-2 Example of an overall production imaging process
New possibilities that blur the boundaries
The architecture of Taskmaster can also enable use cases where documents can be processed less linearly than as described previously.
For example, as shown in Figure 1-3, you can ingest a batch quickly in FileNet Content Manager with minimal data recognition and processing to make the documents available to the ECM users. At the same time, you can continue to execute tasks in the Taskmaster workflow, such as some user-attended operations, or wait for conditions to complete. Upon completion of the outstanding tasks, Taskmaster can automatically update the metadata of the documents in FileNet Content Manager.
Figure 1-3 Nonlinear processing showing postcommittal indexing by Taskmaster
In another case, as shown in Figure 1-4, documents can be ingested in FileNet Content Manager first, and then a workflow can be started. Then, at specific steps in that workflow, Rulerunner actions can be started to validate or perform math functions on data added to the BPM work items. Alternatively, these actions can look up information in a business database to normalize the data as the workflow progresses.
Figure 1-4 Nonlinear processing showing the usage of Rulerunner
In another example as shown in Figure 1-5, you can have a process in which some documents are ingested in FileNet Content Manager, starting a workflow. Again at specific steps, the Taskmaster application can be called in to perform specific tasks, such as starting a scan or importing a job to attach additional supporting documents to a case.
Figure 1-5 Nonlinear processing showing the usage of Taskmaster scan or import
To implement a solution for these use cases, customization and modification are required.
1.2.4 Focus on Taskmaster
The key components that make any production imaging solution possible are the components that provide document digitization. However, the components that automate data extraction, classification, and separation are of equal critical importance to deliver an efficient and cost reduction solution. These activities are otherwise labor-intensive and represent major running expenses that grow as a proportion of the document volumes and that limit returns on investment. In this regard, Taskmaster, with its advanced automation capabilities, is a major asset and a differentiator of the Production Imaging Edition offering.
Taskmaster is also the latest new product in the IBM ECM product family. For this reason, this book focuses specifically on the functionality of Taskmaster. The other main components of the solution, such as FileNet Content Manager and BPM tools, are covered at a much higher level.
For more detailed information about FileNet Content Manager and BPM tools, see the following IBM Redbooks publications:
•IBM FileNet Content Manager Implementation Best Practices and Recommendations, SG24-7547
•IBM FileNet P8 Platform and Architecture, SG24-7667
•Introducing IBM FileNet Business Process Manager, SG24-7509
1.3 Examples of applications
This section reviews the types of applications where you can take advantage of Taskmaster and production imaging technologies.
Taskmaster can be used in many scenarios, from simple to complex, from handling simple correspondence documents with no structure, to complex forms with intricate layouts, such as those found in the healthcare industry. The more complex the data structure and the density are, the more specialized and complex the application is, and the more resource-intensive the processing is.
Central to the implementation of any Taskmaster solution is the concept of an application. An application unites a set of Taskmaster capabilities with the aim of solving a specific business need. By combining the set of functions that ready for immediate use, Taskmaster can address various use cases. Its sample and add-on applications, which are geared at addressing specific business situations, are not necessarily confined to these domains. For example, consider the functionality that is implemented in Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture to process invoices with line items. You can use this functionality in other domains where there is a need to process documents with similar characteristics, such as in transportation and logistics, with shipping manifests, or in manufacturing with nomenclatures.
However, you must keep in perspective that the reach of the applications extends beyond the pure document capture aspect. Combining them with the flexibility offered by the web deployment options of Taskmaster and the repository and business process management infrastructure of FileNet Content Manager provides a true enterprise-wide imaging solution that can use resources anywhere in the organization.
1.3.1 Cross industry: Automated forms processing
You can achieve significant savings by automating data entry with forms processing software. Taskmaster reduces or eliminates expensive typing of data and delivers data seamlessly to your business applications quickly, accurately, and more cost effectively than manual methods.
Taskmaster applications apply various technologies to locate, extract, and validate the accuracy of data from several forms, including health claims and tax returns. This functionality also applies to unstructured and semi-structured forms, such as invoices, shipping bills, and explanations of benefit.
Taskmaster can capture handprint, machine print, check boxes, and barcodes, including combinations on the same document. The dynamic reusable rules of Taskmaster deliver a high level of flexibility over every aspect of the capture process. They can be used across multiple types of forms to normalize data and ensure consistency. You can choose from hundreds of prebuilt rules in the action libraries, modify them, or create new ones by using Datacap Studio, which is the intuitive point-and-click configuration environment of Taskmaster. You can build complex forms processing workflows, without expensive programming, and test and implement them in a short time.
1.3.2 Cross industry: Distributed capture
Great savings in shipping costs can be achieved if you are able to scan documents at the point of origin and send them electronically. This same concept applies if your operators in charge of verification can work from anywhere with a workstation and a browser, whether at home or in a low cost area. Cost savings, speedier input, and more IT flexibility for your organization are among the benefits of distributed capture.
Taskmaster Web is a thin-client capture software that enables browser-based scanning and verification or indexing. You only need to download ActiveX components for remote scanning and indexing, greatly reducing implementation and administration headaches. Taskmaster Web provides a seamless integration to your back-end business applications and image repositories. It can be easily assimilated into your existing environment, reducing expenses without disruption.
One key to the success of a distributed capture solution is comprehensive oversight by an administrator. To this end, Taskmaster Web provides administrative tools to monitor and report on all work done remotely. A user logs in to Taskmaster Web with a password and starts working. All user permissions and privileges are centrally controlled by the administrator.
1.3.3 Cross industry: General business documents processing
Virtually any business can benefit from the automated classification and data capture technology of Taskmaster to reduce costs and improve document processing time for various back-office documents. These documents include the following types among others:
•Inbound sales orders and subscriptions
•General business correspondence
•Human resources documents, such as job applications, resumes, beneficiaries statement, withholding forms, reports, and contracts
•Marketing documents, including free-form documents, data sheets, product descriptions, press releases, announcements, and white papers
One way to achieve results quickly when processing various document types is to use the flexible capture capabilities of Taskmaster. With minimal configuration required, you can configure the document types for your structured and semistructured information. Then, you can let Taskmaster automatically locate data and assist you with adding new document types with a few clicks as you go.
Taskmaster relies on a unique feature called fingerprinting to identify incoming documents based on their layout and match them to known document types. After a type of document is recognized, the data is located and extracted automatically. In most cases, no operator needs to get involved.
However, in some cases, the document is of an unexpected type, or there is so much variability that its type cannot be determined with high confidence. In such cases, the document must be processed manually by an operator who determines the type of document that is being processed. The operator visually locates and points in the image to the key data that defines the document type. Examples of such data include an invoice number, purchase order, or vendor name, as in the case of an invoice.
From this manual processing, Taskmaster can record the recognized data and its location in the image. Then it uses this information to automatically recognize and process similar documents in the future. Over time, the exceptions become less frequent. You do not need to go through an extensive, time-consuming training and setup phase to process your documents. Also you can start document capture quickly and improve the process as you go, which is called flexible capture.
The Flex sample application, together with the Flex Manager configuration tool, provide all you need to set up your flexible capture operations quickly. The verification task shown in Figure 1-6 on page 25 has a simple GUI layout. This layout is populated automatically with the appropriate fields and matching image snippets based the type of document that has been recognized.
Figure 1-6 Sample application showing flexible capture
For text-intensive, free-form documents, Taskmaster uses the Wordfire connector and IBM Classification Module to classify and separate documents automatically. It eliminates the need for tedious manual prescan preparation, allowing you to process batches that contain multiple types of documents.
1.3.4 Cross industry: Accounts payable
Organizations that process invoices manually or scan without the help of optical recognition technology can significantly increase efficiency and accuracy through recognition-assisted automation.
Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture is a solution specifically designed for processing invoices. The application automatically extracts all the important information from an invoice, including line items, and delivers it to your business application with no manual data entry.
Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture ships with special invoice-centric functionality. It is designed for the unique requirements of Accounts Payable. It includes the ability to apply global rules to all or specific types of invoices, run multiple rules per field, automatically find fields and line items over multiple pages, reconcile purchase orders, and attach vendor numbers. Figure 1-7 shows the user interface of Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture.
Figure 1-7 Accounts Payable Capture add-on application for capturing invoices
The Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture add-on application includes the following features:
•Processes new invoices dynamically.
•Automatically attaches the vendor ID number to known invoices.
•Supports multipage invoices and line item capture.
•Looks up data and checks math to ensure accuracy.
•Provides plenty of flexibility to configure the rules to manage your invoice.
•Formats data to feed into Accounts Payable systems.
•Provides for easy purchase order reconciliation at data entry.
•Enables you to notify the system administrator by email that a new vendor needs to be added to the database.
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Licensing: Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture is an add-on application that requires additional licensing.
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1.3.5 Cross industry: Surveys
Although many processes adapt easily to the electronic environment, survey and opinion processing has stubbornly remained a paper-based process. Part of the reason is that a survey is not valid until it has been completed. Also many in-depth surveys are too long to fit easily into an online form. If a survey taker drops out at any step along the way, the survey data becomes useless.
Taskmaster helps marketing companies acquire and process data faster and at less cost by reducing processing time. Also the ability of Taskmaster to handle various unstructured forms enables maximum flexibility in survey form design.
By using Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology, Taskmaster captures completed check boxes or bubbles, machine print data, barcode data, and handprint commentary or explanations. It interprets the values and uploads them together with the information of the respondent into a survey database for analysis.
For convenience, surveys can also be scanned or verified in a browser with Taskmaster Web. Taskmaster Web delivers the same functionality for on-site, remote data gathering for conferences, trade shows, and mobile surveyors.
The Survey sample application (see Figure 1-8 on page 28) can be used as an example to configure your own application to process documents. The documents can be as diverse as questionnaires, surveys, tests, evaluations, time sheets, applications, lottery forms, and inventory counts.
Figure 1-8 Sample application to capture of surveys
1.3.6 Government: Tax return processing
Tax and government revenue organizations rely on document imaging technology to accelerate tax data input, enable easier access to information, streamline operations, and provide better service to taxpayers. Essentially, they can shorten the turnaround time from the receipt of a return to the issuance of a refund check. Although federal, state and local governments encourage businesses and individuals to file returns and other documents electronically, a significant volume of tax forms still arrives at mail centers in paper form.
Taskmaster coordinates the scanning of tax documents and attachments; the extraction, validation, and hand-off of data to back-end systems; and the indexing of images into repositories with minimal human intervention.
Taskmaster Web can enable remote scanning or remote verification by at-home workers to help government tax departments increase productivity and distribute work to lower income areas.
What makes Taskmaster the solution of choice is its ability to handle exceptions and problems that are always associated with high volumes of forms, especially hand-filled forms such as tax documents.
The Taskmaster 1040EZ sample application demonstrates the processing of US tax return forms. The application uses ICR technology to capture hand-written characters (Figure 1-9). It validates the data by checking the presence of mandatory values, applying math, and enforcing verifications against the tax rules, across the entire document.
Figure 1-9 Sample application for capturing a US tax return form
1.3.7 Healthcare and insurance: Medical claims
Insurance companies were among the first to embrace scanning and document management to help control costs and streamline their operations, which depend on the ability to rapidly and accurately process claims and policies. They also need to ensure compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations regarding privacy and data standards.
Taskmaster Medical Claims Capture is a solution that automates data entry for CMS-1500 and UB-04 medical claim forms used in the US. The application helps to eliminate costly, error-prone manual data entry and accelerate claim processing time.
Taskmaster Medical Claims Capture manages the entire capture process, from the scanning of claims to the recognition of data fields to the validation and verification of data for accuracy. It also coordinates the upload of HIPAA-compliant claim data to adjudication systems for payment.
Because Taskmaster Medical Claims Capture (Figure 1-10) is built on the Taskmaster platform, health insurers can take advantage of browser-based distributed scanning and remote indexing for more efficient distribution of work.
Figure 1-10 Medical Claims Capture add-on application showing the capture of healthcare forms
Taskmaster Medical Claims Capture has unique features that claim processor value. For example, it performs automatic database lookups to validate data against provider, member, diagnoses, and procedure codes. It also has an intuitive verification interface that enables fast and easy identification of claim data.
Because of the higher data density of the medical forms, Taskmaster uses the color dropout technique to remove grid lines in the form background to make it easier to recognize useful data. Taskmaster achieves this processing by using special forms with red ink that drop out when scanned with color filtering or image processing in the scanner.
Figure 1-11 shows the original form on the left side and the color-dropped-out form on the right side. The form on the right side shows only the data that is pertinent to the capture application.
Figure 1-11 Color dropout to remove grid lines
Taskmaster Medical Claims Capture includes the following features:
•Generates a dynamic template for every page
•Supports all CMS forms and variations with no pre-configuration of templates
•Offers the ability for users to capture 100% of fields from both CMS 1500 and UB-04 claims.
•Captures and stores attachments with an accompanying claim
•Supports permanent image overlay for archival
•Offers advanced validations to ensure accuracy, including lookups for member, provider, diagnosis, procedural terminology code, place of service, service date check, and math calculation on charges
•Enables configuration and modifications without expensive programming
•Offers HIPAA-compliant 837 EDI export
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Licensing: Taskmaster Medical Claims Capture is an add-on application that requires additional licensing.
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1.3.8 Banking and finance: Loan applications
Mortgage loan applications can total hundreds of pages of different document types, from titles and credit reports to appraisals to certificates of occupancy. The faster a financial institution can process all the documents required for a mortgage, the faster they can provide funds to the customer. Because mortgage documents must be maintained for the life of the mortgage and beyond, fast and efficient imaging can deliver cost savings and help maintain compliance.
Taskmaster automatically captures data on loan documents to feed back-end systems and accelerate indexing for image storage and retrieval. With the help of content-based classification technology, Taskmaster helps classify and identify all the different documents within a loan portfolio, reducing or eliminating the need for tedious manual prescan preparation.
By using the browser-based Taskmaster Web application, financial institutions can distribute scanning to branch offices and affiliates, so that loan applications can be scanned seconds after final signatures by the customer.
1.3.9 Transportation and logistics: Shipping documents
Transportation and logistics face unique challenges in the gathering and management of data. Transportation companies have a mobile workforce and often a distributed sales force. Tracking deliveries is a paper-intensive process. Also, regulations governing the transport of goods across state lines and between countries are placing increasing constraints on the business.
Companies can use Taskmaster Web for distributed remote scanning of documents generated in the field, such as proofs of delivery, sales orders, and fleet maintenance documents. By using Taskmaster Web this way, companies can reduce the enormous cost of mailing or faxing documents to a central headquarters for processing, accelerate input, and eliminate delays in billing.
Shipping and logistics companies have a growing pressure to provide complete information about the contents of a shipment at the time that the goods cross the border between states or countries. The Patriot Act and other regulations demand rapid and accurate data extraction from complex commercial invoices to fulfill customs requirements. Taskmaster Accounts Payable Capture with its ability to capture line items from multiple page invoices is well adapted to this use (see 1.3.4, “Cross industry: Accounts payable” on page 25).
1.4 Conclusion
As shown in this chapter, Taskmaster can be used in many areas and industries. Bundling Taskmaster with FileNet Content Manager and other tools in the Production Imaging Edition product offering provides the all-in-one solution from one vendor for your production imaging needs.
Chapter 2, “System architecture” on page 35, highlights the system architecture of Production Imaging Edition. Then Chapter 3, “Production imaging functionality” on page 51, explains the Taskmaster functionality in more detail, including its user interfaces and the capture process.
1 AIIM State Of The ECM Industry Report, 2011, 650 responses
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