Fax management
- Article 17 of 26
- M-iD, April 2005
Facsimilie machines are still in widespread use, and so long as they remain so, the documents they produce must be properly managed.
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Providing employees, other branches and departments, suppliers and customers with these standardised forms can cut costs very quickly once the system is up and running.
While OCR may not be sufficiently good to process handwriting, it is however, good enough to recognise typed text on faxes. “People used to have high expectations of OCR - everyone expected it to recognise handwriting. But it was appalling. But then expectations dropped, recognition improved and they've met in the middle. OCR has improved and people don't expect the world,” says Castelle AMS's Steggall.
Imaging systems, such as those from Kofax that are commonly integrated with scanning applications, will often use more than one OCR engine, compare the results, and if they do not agree, they will pass on the results to an exception process. “For best practice, you'll probably want a user validation stage,” says Bashrat Din, Northern Europe managing director of fax server vendor Esker. “Most companies are more comfortable providing tools to help users, rather than complete automation.”
The exception process will need to cope with faxes not provided on standard forms, that are not legible enough to be OCR'd with confidence, and handwritten faxes. This should be almost the only place where human input is needed, however, a good rule of thumb is to expect costs from manual processing of faxes to be halved by automation, say analysts.
These costs can be reduced even further if there is an existing production scanning process in place. While setting up from scratch a fax input process that will automate the input of data into corporate systems will take some work, any company that already has a production scanning process in place will find that faxing fits into it very easily.
“If you've invested in workflow, just adding a fax server to the front of that is easy-peasy,” says Jonathan Symons, managing director of software and services supplier ITESoft.
The degree of integration required will also be a factor in implementation time and costs. A standard, out-of-the-box implementation may only take a few weeks to get up and running normally, says Symons, but a full blown implementation that requires complex business rules, validation of data when it is entered into systems will take considerably longer.
For that kind of integration project, he estimates between 60 and 100 man days of effort are required to complete the work. But it should pay for itself within a year or 18 months.
Faxing may be the forgotten communications medium, but it remains a vital business tool to many organisations. Bringing it under control needs to be on everyone's agenda.
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