New Services Make Getting Started Easier
Guest post by Joseph Hanania, Senior Vice President, Global Document Outsourcing Business Group, Xerox
It might seem unlikely that a lowly transaction process could be the starting point for digital transformation, but think about this. Inbound transaction-oriented documents like claim forms, new account paperwork or hiring documentation account for a large percentage of the paper-based content enterprises struggle through every day. Digital transformation (DX) promises to automate and streamline these document-driven processes, so doesn’t it make sense to start DX there, too?
Companies have a need right now to get started on their digital workplace, and one of the best ways to do that is around document and data workflows. New Xerox Document Transaction Processing Services (DTPS) remove the back-office barriers to participating in DX. “We’re truly helping customers transform their business processes,” says my colleague, Andy Jones, Xerox Vice President, Workflow Automation, Large Enterprise Operations.
Taking Digital Transformation to the Back Office
DTPS goes beyond a digital mailroom or optimizing just one process or area, instead focusing on where the touch points are. The goal is to replace high-touch back office steps, starting with all the kinds of documents that trigger activities and processes. Incoming documents and other unstructured data often feed a main process within an organization. It could be a core business function, or flow into a legacy platform or solution. “The real power is when you connect DTPS into industry workflow solutions and drive those forward,” notes Andy Jones.
This collection of offsite document transaction services delivers key linkages and handover points from capture and processing activities into the core operation of custom business processes. The five capabilities brought together with the new DTPS reflect the typical document lifecycle:
- Capture
- Transform
- Process
- Store
- Deliver
The connections between these capabilities come together under one unified environment, an advantage for avoiding the potential complexities of process DX.
Dynamic Capture: Scalable to Customer Volume
DTPS enables DX by improving the flow of information into digital business processes, and that starts with capture. A major innovation is letting customers interact at the front end of the process. That’s necessary in environments involving ad hoc capture and input, or geographically low volume locations. These businesses don’t want to wait on a separate process to handle their small input load, yet it’s just as important to them as it is a to a business with hundreds or thousands of documents a day.
Capture is dynamic when it uploads and enters information in real time. There’s been an increase in dynamic capture, as we go from paper input at a multifunction device to more dynamic capture from mobile devices. Where organizations have intelligent devices under MPS contract, they can use intelligent MFDs to directly ingest information from custom menus on devices or from mobile devices used as cameras.
Dynamic capture allows image correction on the device itself and uploading into the processing app. The user can validate data at the smart device and pass it on to the next point in the process. The challenge is that mobile workflow can be quite open to the environment. All of our mobile data capture is highly secure. Having captured and validated information, any local copies on devices get erased once the correct copy goes into the workflow.
Up Next: DTPS and the Transform Stage
Although the scale may differ, the SMB market, the channel and large enterprises face similar operational challenges, and organizations of all kinds are turning to DX to solve them. It levels the playing field through technology, and the need for DX-enabling services is growing almost everywhere. The new Xerox DTPS unify the process environment, bringing DX that much closer to back-office employee management and accounting platforms for a variety of enterprises.
In coming blogs, we’ll cover the Transform stage in detail, along other the other aspects of DTPS and its role in Digital Transformation.
