Technology Reseller v37

DATA CAPTURE technologyreseller.co.uk 39 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 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 for what reason, e.g. 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, even if they are on the cloud, keep the content in their repositories. In our case, we never own the customer’s data; the 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 FUSiON extension ibml launches simpler FUSiON scanner for centralised mailrooms and business process outsourcers Initially, ibml plans to sell Cloud Capture direct, so for the time being its channel partners might be more interested in the latest, entry-level addition to the company’s FUSiON range of high-volume production scanners. Capable of scanning and processing up to 292 A4 pages per minute, the ibml FUSiON 7200 is an affordable option for ibml’s mid-tier customers that need to scan large volumes of documents and integrate them into line of business applications and workflows. These include business process outsourcers and shared service centres, as well as 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. “We think there is a rebirth of the centralised mailroom,” explained Susheel John. “The centralised mailroom has always been important, but it is more important now because in a centralised mailroom privacy of data can be addressed better and customers need to digitise things that they were previously doing on the MFP round the corner or on a little scanner on their desks. People are not at their desks any more, but still need to access that information from wherever they are working.” He added: “The new ibml FUSiON 7200 is for customers who want a more cost-effective scanner to be able to scan large volumes of documents.” The scanning system includes ibml’s image processing system iQpro, which provides automatic de-skewing, rotation, cropping, colour correction and other enhancements, with simultaneous output of colour, greyscale and bitonal images. A range of optional accessories are available to add intelligence to the scanning process, including a barcode reader, MICR[2] reader for cheque processing and an inkjet printer to date/ time stamp documents for audit trail and compliance purposes.