Overview

Large organisations have been doing Centralised Document Capture. Today, due to lower cost of bandwidth and scanning equipment, distributed capture is a much better and cost effective option. It offers speed, process efficiencies as well as lower costs.

Key Challenges in Distributed Scanning

Distributed Capture has its own set of challenges related to user learning and technology fitment.

The low-end Scanners are meant for document creation rather than processing. This means that these scanners support high resolution color scanning as default. The documents created are large and are difficult to transfer and process.

Hence, there is a need to centrally control the scanning environment. Also, while transferring the scanned images, the documents need to be converted to a standard as per definitions maintained centrally.

Once the strategy for the distributed capture is adopted, physical document tracking becomes very important. It has to be ensured that all the documents that have been imaged and transferred are later available for safe keeping and referrals.

Newgen's Approach to Distributed Capture

Newgen offers a comprehensive Distributed Capture Solution for large, multi-locational organizations.

The Newgen solution is scalable to handle millions of pages and hundreds of branches which can operate out of a simple browser interface, an MFP device or production grade scanning through OmniScan.

The High Volume Branches can be equipped with the Newgen Production Scanning tool, OmniScan. OmniScan further connects to the Central Server for transfer of the scanned documents.

The low volume Branches can be equipped with a browser based interface for scanning documents via low end scanners or multi-function peripherals.

The Documents captured at the various Branches and subsequent transfer of these documents, maybe released into either of the following:

Document Repositories: Newgen's OmniDocs or other Industry standard Document Management Systems (DMS) for archival.

Workflow Solutions: Newgen's OmniFlow or other Industry standard Business Process Management (BPM) systems.

Enterprise Applications: Any Enterprise Application for providing document availability as per business requirement.

The Distributed Capture solution, further, is strengthened by its ability to monitor and track the documents while in transit. As an EoD operation, the documents and files are chronologically numbered, are packed in boxes and shipped to the central location. These boxes and the associated documents are tracked by the built-in Document Tracking System for the ETA at the Center. The Document Tracking System generates reports pertaining to the arrival of the documents and their location at the document warehouse. This helps in tracking the documents and also retrieving the documents from the warehouse, if required.

Solution Highlights

The heart of the Distributed Capture Solution is the Capture Server which centrally controls the capture of documents from the multiple branches and manages the subsequent processing of these documents. Some of the integral components of this Server are:

Schedule Definition for Transfer: Different schedules and priorities may be set for transfer of document images from various branches to leverage the slack hours (per branch) and optimize bandwidth consumption.

Document Pull Service: The document pull architecture ensures that Document Images are pulled from the branches as per the defined schedules. This service also supports ad-hoc upload of images created at low volume branches using low-end scanners or multi-function Devices.

Centralized maintenance of the configuration files: The Configuration Files which provide the information regarding document scan resolution, quality and whether the documents would be auto-recognized or manually identified, would be maintained at the server and synchronized at the branches. This includes configuration settings for auto-image compression and conversion to standard resolution.

User Authentication: LDAP integration with existing user domains is leveraged to allow only authorized users to scan and/or upload document images.

Bandwidth Management: Optimization algorithms ensure that upload of document images happen on schedule, and/or as per priority without choking the bandwidth or terminating the upload from any site.

Document Tracking: The Document Tracking feature allows reconciliation of the documents at the central site. Extensive tracking of the boxes and the documents from the branch to the central location helps maintain a log of documents which are missing in transit.

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