Managed.IT - issue 60

DATA CAPTURE 19 www.managedITmag.co.uk customer’s documents pass through our system for processing and data extraction, but, ultimately, we leave the data in the customer’s repository whether that’s on a private cloud, public cloud or on their own on- premise solution or system.” This keeps customers in control of their data and ensures that if they decide to stop using ibml, their data is secure and they don’t have to spend millions of dollars migrating it from one solution to another. New applications ibml Cloud Capture is an exciting addition to ibml’s portfolio that extends its strengths in data capture to new areas and brings new possibilities to customers through robotic process automation. “One source of input will continue to be documents that we scan, but the fact of the matter is that customers increasingly have documents that are born digitally,” explained Susheel John. “Research shows that today 30-40% of documents come to customers in the form of paper, which they need to digitise and input and which we have the technology for. Another 50-60% of documents come into organisations digitally. Cloud Capture is going to help us to automate that piece of the jigsaw for our customers and expand our use cases and our penetration within customers.” www.ibml.com programme tasks themselves, using drag and drop functionality, or, for more complex tasks, make use of ibml’s professional services and implementation team. Susheel John says RPA is particularly useful for feeding captured content into legacy business applications, such as a document management solution, a line of business (LOB) application, like SAP, or a loan processing solution. “One way to do this is through APIs. But many customers have legacy systems that may not allow for easy integration. Instead of having a user cut and paste content from the capture solution into the LOB application, you can create a robot to do that,” he said. “Another use case is image- enabling applications. For example, if you have a legacy banking solution that doesn’t have the ability to retrieve and display associated images alongside transactions, you could set up a bot that, when you click to retrieve a document, opens up the other application, retrieves the image and displays it for you.” One useful feature of the RPA capability within ibml Cloud Capture is the ability to record and review video footage of tasks carried out by bots to identify where errors occur and what the causes are, for example a new user interface installed as part of a software update. Content services The third key capability of ibml Cloud Capture are its content management services, including integration with all back-end systems and electronic content management (ECM) systems, as well as Microsoft solutions, such as Sharepoint, Microsoft 365 and Azure. This gives users the ability to store, search for, retrieve and view content, wherever it is located, through one single platform. “What’s unique about our content services capabilities,” added Susheel John, “is that we never own the customer’s data. Most other content management platforms, like Opentext, Filenet, Box, even if they are on the cloud, keep the content in their repositories. In our case, we never own the customer’s data; the available almost instantly. All the user need do is choose the volumes and the functionality they require (e.g. capture, process automation and/or content services), spend a few hours or days training the application and they are ready to go. “One of the banes of capture solutions in the marketplace is that customers spend a long time purchasing them and a long time implementing them. It can take 6 to 12 months just to implement a solution, because they have to stand up infrastructure and install it and, once they’ve done that, they realise that it’s not sufficient – we need this feature, we need this feature. There is none of this hassle with us; it is very quick to set up and go,” he said. “Then, once they get used to this and are successful with it, they are ready to expand to other applications. Somebody might have started with an invoice processing solution for their accounts payable and when that is working fine expand to customer onboarding or HR onboarding.” Advanced automation ibml Cloud Capture extracts data not only from structured documents, such as forms, where required data is easy to locate, but also semi-structured and unstructured documents that account for 57% of inputs, using machine learning and deep neural network technologies to identify documents and automatically tag the content that needs to be extracted. “It learns as users tag content and, eventually, automatically tags content according to the document type – this is an invoice, this is a receipt, this is a contract, this is an HR onboarding document. It could be a form with fields, so it knows where to go every time, or something totally unstructured like an email, in which case it would read the content and automatically tag what needs to be extracted from that document.” Additional automation is provided by built-in robotic process automation (RPA), which lets organisations save time and reduce errors by using software bots to automate workflows and/ or repetitive document-centric processes. Customers can ibml Cloud Capture can capture data from multiple sources, including scanners like the ibml FUSiON 7200. The latest addition to ibml’s FUSiON range of high-volume production scanners, the 7200 is designed as an affordable option for centralised mailrooms that, with offices emptied and people working from home, are being asked to consolidate scanning workloads previously done on departmental and workgroup scanners and MFPs. It can scan and process up to 292 A4 pages per minute.