PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT OF INBOUND TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT IN THE GLOBAL ENTERPRISE A BancTec White Paper
SUMMARY Reducing the cost of processing transactions, while meeting clients’ expectations, protecting the information and minimising any related risks, present major challenges to global enterprises. This applies particularly when they operate in widely dispersed geographies and have to comply with local, regional & global regulatory requirements. This white paper looks at how we can optimise the costs and the service levels associated with processing inbound documents within the global enterprise. It also contains a set of steps that need to be considered when developing an effective strategy for the processing and management of inbound documents across the global enterprise.
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PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT OF INBOUND TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT IN THE GLOBAL ENTERPRISE
INTRODUCTION All enterprises are continuously looking for ways to optimise the costs of delivering services and business transactions to their clients. Global enterprises are no exception as they try to benefit from their global model by utilising the most economical resources available, across their global base and local market places. From another perspective, clients’ expectations continue to rise and global enterprises must meet these expectations to stay ahead of the competition. Global Enterprises need to react swiftly to critical information coming from geographically dispersed locations. This information must be routed to the right business stream for processing; while ensuring it is protected and any risks associated with the transactions are managed. Let us look at a typical transaction - processing orders. Orders come from different geographies via a variety of channels including post, faxes and emails. Losing, misrouting or delaying any of these orders will impact the business and may mean losing business opportunities or losing new or existing clients. These orders need to be captured, protected, classified and routed to the relevant “Line of Business” as soon as possible, and all these steps need to be performed efficiently and according to certain service standards. These orders need to be securely archived and retained in-line with the applied legal regulations. Also, all the captured information must be available, within the required retention period, for any future legal discovery process.
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WHAT IS TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT? The content of an inbound document (coming to the organisation) that initiates or drives a back office business transaction (business process) within the organisation is called Transactional Content (TC), for example the content of a purchase order, an application form, an invoice, an insurance claim or a complaint letter. If we look at a purchase order, the content incorporates the information on the order document, such as the name and address of the purchaser, the order reference number, the date of order, the required delivery address, etc. The point of entry of a TC document, for most large organisations is the Mailroom (or the Mail Processing Centre). Most large organisations have several mailrooms (related to different geographies or Line of Businesses). It is in the mailroom, where the inbound documents are prepared, classified and routed to the relevant Line of Business (LoB). In a survey BancTec carried out recently, we found that most global organisations have more than one centre for processing inbound documents:
Area of Concern Our study also highlighted some common concerns Lost or Mis-routed documents related to processing inbound documents & mailrooms Late response time to mail (see table). Most global organisations try to address these concerns in Inaccurate delivery Poor efficiency parallel to optimising the cost of processing inbound Late delivery of documents documents by taking measures such as: Typing errors from invoices Automaton of the mail processing activities. Need to forward hard copy Introduction of a shared mailroom service; by Poor audit trail sharing or centralising mailroom services across Poor accountability different LoBs or regions. Poor security and privacy Outsourcing part, or all, of the mail processing service to specialised external managed service Mismatched data to invoice providers. Slower processing of payments Low productivity Off-shoring part, or all, of the mail service to another lower cost geographical location in their Need to create multiple copies own global base, or in their external global Source: Marketing Research Study, commissioned by market place.. BancTec (USA) in April 2008. The Study involved 200 senior executives, from medium to large enterprises (60% with revenue >$500m, 46% with revenue > $1B.)
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These measures are being increasingly considered particularly in the Financial Services Sector, where organisations are under enormous business pressures to cut their costs, improve profitability and competitiveness. These measures have become widely accepted, because of: Acceptance of the Global Enterprise Concept. Increased adoption of the Process-Oriented Organisation model. Increased interest in outsourcing the business application support using Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Increased appreciation of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a reference model for the enterprise technology architecture because of its agility & flexibility. Availability of different relevant matured technologies at reasonable costs, that: o
Automate, monitor and manage the mail activities across geographical boundaries.
o
Manage, control, securely protect, save and real-time monitor content.
Wide availability of Internet technologies and the relatively low costs of communication and distributed systems infrastructure and management Organisations implementing any of the above measures are looking to achieve: Quick Return on Investment (RoI) (within less than 2 years). Rapid noticeable improvements to the mail services (addressing the concerns highlighted above). Fast deployment of the selected measure(s) and quick transition to the new model.
THE JOURNEY OF THE TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT WITHIN THE ENTERPRISE When the Transactional Content (TC), in the form of a document (paper or electronic), arrives at an organisation, it passes through certain preparation steps before it reaches the LoB application. A document can be classified as one of these: Structured, where the data is always in fixed locations on each document page (for example application forms) Unstructured, where the data is in unfixed locations on each document page (for example a correspondence letter) Semi Structured, where the document has some of the data on fixed locations and some on unfixed locations. (for example a purchase order or an invoice document) The handling of inbound paper documents, in a manual environment, usually involves these steps:
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Most organisations, particularly the ones that receive large volume of inbound documents, have designated mailroom(s) to handle these preparation steps and may have already introduced some form of automation to the above steps to reduce the time and costs of processing. Experienced operators can open and take out the contents of 450 – 550 paper envelopes in one hour. This figure is reduced to about 300 – 320 when the operator is required to open large envelopes, remove staples, and unfold the different documents. Sophisticated envelope opening machines can slit open and take out contents of 9000-22000 envelopes in one hour! Scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies are used to read the content from paper and convert it into digital content that can be more quickly and less costly transferred to the LoB and to electronic archiving.
JUST THE FACTS OUR RESEARCH SHOWS One-half of all respondents indicated that their organization digitally scans inbound mail paper documents during a typical workday. Those companies which handle more than 25,000 documents daily (70%) are significantly more likely than those handling fewer than 25,000 documents (45%) to digitally scan inbound mail. Further, 39% of respondents report using OCR/ICR technology to process inbound mail.
The diagram below illustrates the introduction of limited automation to the processing of inbound TC in the mailroom (automated steps are represented in yellow). The classification step could be done manually or automatically (with a provision of manual handling of exceptions).
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Nowadays, the TC journey can be fully automated using different technologies (with provision for human intervention to handle exceptions and to carry out validation and quality control). Automation can dramatically improve the control and monitoring of the processing and reduce its duration and cost. Cost reduction can reach up to 90%. The automated end-to-end process for processing inbound TC involves these steps:
IMPORT In this step, the inbound content, from the different input channels (fax, scanner, internet or electronic files) is gathered automatically and fed to the next steps. Each document will be registered with a unique identification that will be used for future searching, monitoring and control.
CLASSIFY The documents are classified automatically, using different technologies, into different trays. The classification is carried out using defined rules, related to: a) The layout of the document (in structured documents). b) The recognition of key words (in certain context) (in unstructured documents). c) Combination of both. Different intelligent software engines are used to classify the documents, they have programmable / configurable classification rules and optical character recognition (OCR). Some have built in advanced self-learning intelligence.
CAPTURE The content is extracted from the documents, using extraction engines. The extraction is carried out according to defined rules related to the type of the originating document and the Service. Some engines combine recognition, classification and extraction functions.
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CHECK EXTRACTED CONTENT: Most engines extract contents originated from printed characters with high accuracy (high level of confidence), however, the same does not apply to content originated from handwritten documents. Manual validation of the extracted content is sometimes required to ensure its correctness. This validation exercise is usually carried out by experienced operators in mailroom centres. They check the extracted content against the digital images of the original inbound documents, correct wrongly extracted characters or key missing ones.
EXPORT & ARCHIVE : After ensuring the extracted content is correct, it is exported to the relevant Line of Business Process for further processing. The digital image of the originating document is also usually archived into an archiving, document management or content management system. The image stays secured there during the required retention period, in compliance with the applied regulations. The availability of different technologies and a high performance networking infrastructure have made this automated process an affordable reality.
Area of Concern
NOTE : Most of the participants in our Research Study agreed that an automated end-2-end solution for processing inbound TC, similar to the one described above, will resolve or minimize the concerns highlighted earlier (refer to the table on the right).
Lost or Mis-routed documents Late response time to mail Inaccurate delivery Poor efficiency Late delivery of documents Typing errors from invoices Need to forward hard copy Poor audit trail Poor accountability Poor security and privacy Mismatched data to invoice Slower processing of payments Low productivity Need to create multiple copies
Percent* 59% 51% 50% 50% 47% 46% 46% 45% 42% 42% 41% 39% 38% 37%
* Percent of votes based on 200 multiple responses Source: Marketing Research Study, commissioned by BancTec (USA) in April 2008. The Study involved 200 senior executives, from medium to large enterprises (60% with revenue >$500m, 46% with revenue > $1B.)
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WHAT ARE THE KEY ISSUES RELATED TO PROCESSING INBOUND TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT? 1. CENTRALISED VS DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT PROCESSING: Most organisations have already invested in automating one or more of the above steps or inherited some of the relevant technologies as a result of mergers & acquisitions. Also, it is common to find silos of automated mailroom solutions dedicated to some Line of Business Streams in some regions. Is it economically more effective for a geographically dispersed organisation to consolidate all the different mailroom processing platforms and move into a centralised shared process using a low-cost and effective resourcing model? Logically the answer is Yes. However, this is not always an easy decision, as regional organisations and successful LoBs, want to be more autonomous, exercise control over their content processing steps, control own local Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and deal with local resources who speak the same language and work within the same time zones. So they usually try to push for local TC processing solutions. It is possible to reach a model that nearly satisfies all stakeholders, a model that incorporates the required business benefits by building a solution that supports a combination of: a. Distributed remote scanning or distributed remote capture, that provides some local control & monitoring, for the Regions and LoBs. b. Centrally managed Shared Service that provides managed mailroom services at reduced costs by sharing highly utilised resources/systems across different LoBs. c. The Centralised Shared Service, can further optimise the costs by using lower cost resources available offshore for specific services, such as keying/checking from image.
This model is possible and it delivers a high business return, it requires the right technology platform that supports the end-to-end processing of inbound TC in a global configuration and provides real-time document, services and process management. Page | 9
2. MONITORING, CONTROLLING AND MANAGING THE CONTENT JOURNEY The digitised TC travels across the organisational boundaries and across multiple geographies. It flows according to the end-to-end process described above. The journey of the TC needs to be monitored and controlled to ensure that a) Only authorised persons can access & process the relevant content and b) The content reaches the required destination, in the right quality and within the required performance indicators. While the end-to-end process has its own SLAs, each step in this journey, has an associated SLA to define expected service measures and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These SLAs need to be set, measured, monitored and continuously optimised to achieve the required level of service. Different performance indicators are required by different management levels. Senior managers are interested in monitoring costs of transactions and customer retention/satisfaction levels; Supervisors are interested in monitoring the performance of their teams and their local SLAs. Operators may want feedback on their own performance and volume of work. A key regulatory requirement is that all the activities that happen during the TC journey that have an impact on the content must be recorded for future auditing and tracking. The Business Process Management (BPM) technology provides the tools to design and automate processes across organisational boundaries, to control the execution of these processes, to monitor, to record changes and to control the progression of the steps. While enterprise wide Systems Management suites provide the enterprise with tools to monitor and manage (in real-time) the different systems components - at an infrastructure components level: The BPM suites provide the enterprise with tools to monitor and manage the business process execution and performance and the delivery of services.
3. HANDLING EXTENSIVE VARIETY OF INBOUND TC DOCUMENT TYPES This is another key issue. The different types of inbound documents required by the different LoBs and their anticipated volumes have an impact on the type of activities required within the end-to-end process, the required resourcing model, the achievable SLAs and the technology components of the solution. Assessments need to be carried out to capture the types of documents required by the different LoBs in the different geographies currently and in the future. The organisation, needs to evaluate and optimise the designs of the different types of structured documents across the LoBs, to cut the time of processing and to reduce required manual exception handling. The organisation needs to focus on the documents that have a real impact on the business.
4. REUSING & INTEGRATING EXISTING SOLUTION ASSETS As mentioned earlier, most organisations have already invested in one or more solutions to automate the mail processing steps. It is reasonable that most organisations want to re-use and leverage some of the existing assets. Proper assessment of the existing assets needs to be carried out to consider if the business benefits from re-using them and to plan for their possible integration with the new solution.
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5. SUPPORT FOR DIFFERENT LOCAL LANGUAGE VARIANTS Suitable automated solutions for the global enterprise need to have provisions for supporting different required local language variants.
6. COMPLIANCE A new solution needs to comply with the requirements of the applicable global and regional regulations. Sometimes regional requirements are missed due to lack of understanding or ignorance.
WHAT TECHNOLOGIES FORM TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS? Business Process Management (BPM)
This technology provides the core platform to automate the end-to-end TC processing and to manage: 1- The different steps during the execution of the process. 2- The services provided by the different engines used in these steps. BPM provides the real-time business monitoring, control and tracking of the documents, activities and SLAs at local and global levels.
Classification, Capture & Image Handling Technologies
These are engines that provide document classification, (according to defined rules), data character recognition and extraction of relevant content from the variety of input sources and image processing & conversion.
Archival or Content Management Technologies
Once the content is classified and verified it is usually securely stored using archiving or content management technologies, for future retrieval, management and destruction. Usually these platforms provide some level of support for Security, Retention Policies, Record Management,, Information Right Management and Data Protection. On top of the above key technologies, there are additional technologies for Data Retrieval, Business Reporting tools, Data Protection, Security and Keying Clients. A Transactional Content Management solution incorporates all the above technologies fully integrated in a unified application platform.
7. PROVISION FOR A POTENTIAL E-DISCOVERY PROCESS The costs of e-discovery of digital data following any litigation is very high and organisations need to consider solutions that have the tools that can identify and classify content for effective discovery to reduce the costs of any future litigation.
8. INTEGRATION OF MAILROOM WITH THE DIFFERENT LINE OF BUSINESS APPLICATIONS The requirements for integration with the different existing LoB applications need to be considered at an early stage.
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9. SUPPORT FOR THE DIFFERENT INBOUND CHANNELS ACROSS DIFFERENT REGIONS Early consideration needs to be given to the different inbound channels (currently used or will be required) in the different regions. No arbitrary assumptions on the availability and level of usage in the different regions should be made. Input from the local organisations and market research need to be considered. Market research is particularly useful as it shows future trends of channel usage. It is important that selected solutions either directly support key channels or can be customised to provide this function.
STEPS TO CONSIDER WHEN DEVELOPING A STRATEGY FOR A TRANSACTIONAL CONTENT PROCESSING SOLUTION Choosing a suitable strategy for building an effective TC management/ processing platform that supports the enterprise’s global (and local) business needs is not easy. The recommended approach involves these steps:
1. UNDERSTAND YOUR GLOBAL ENTERPRISE VISION, BUSINESS OBJECTIVES & DRIVERS These will give you a good framework or context that will define your critical success factors for the design & implementation of a Transactional Content Management platform. For example if one of your enterprise’s business objectives is to extend to a new geographical region, you need to consider LoB’s requirements in the new region, the applicable local regulations, the blockers, and so on.
2. CONSIDER THE CURRENT & FUTURE NEEDS OF THE DIFFERENT LOBS & REGIONS Current & new streams of business. Required types of inbound channels, documents, volumes (now & future). Applied regulatory / security requirements. Required SLAs by LoBs and users.
3. SURVEY THE CURRENT DIFFERENT MAILROOMS ACROSS THE ORGANISATION The services they provide. The volumes of inbound TC processed in each mailroom, using the different inbound channels and for each LoB. The level of maturity of their current mailroom processes. The level of automation in each mailroom. The resources engaged and their level of skills and experience. Current costs of processing documents in different mailrooms. The applied regulatory requirements, with regards to security, data protection, document retention and auditing. The available communication infrastructure. Required SLAs and current levels of achievements. Any external Service Providers and the services they provide.
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4. IDENTIFY THE GAP BETWEEN CURRENTLY AVAILABLE & FUTURE SERVICES The new services that need to be supported. New SLAs that need to be met. The changes that need to be supported (document types, channels, volumes and regulatory requirements).
5. DEFINE A GENERIC END-TO-END MAILROOM PROCESS FOR TC PROCESSING Review the current mailroom processes in the key regions: Focus on the 20% of the key regions that generate 80% of the core business (using Pareto 80/20 principle). Use the outcome of the previous steps to produce high level process map(s) of the mailroom process for each region. Compare the process maps to find if there are duplicate steps that can be provided as centralized, shared or off-shored services. Also consider the steps that can be automated or discarded. Assess the impact of the process changes in each region. Define an applicable generic process: Identify the steps that are applicable to most regions. Could these be designed as a single shared service? What is the impact? Where are the most economic places to run the services within the enterprise global base? Could it be outsourced or off-shored? Define which steps of the process can be centralised and which need to be locally available. Produce a reference map for the end-toend generic process. You may need to consider more than one end-to-end generic process map.
6. DEFINE THE REQUIRED SOLUTION The captured requirements in the previous steps and the defined generic end-to-end processes will help you define the parameters of the required solution. You need to consider issues such as: Reusing existing technology assets. The requirements for future scalability. Existing IT strategies & policies with regards to H/W platforms, content management, communication infrastructure, security, enterprise systems management & BPM platforms. Also you need to consider the available Transactional Content Management & Processing solutions in the market, their suitability to your requirements and the required customisation.
7. DEFINE THE POSSIBLE TRANSITION OPTIONS The transition option defines the steps that migrate your current diverse mailrooms to your required solution. Consider different Transition Options and their impact on the global business, organisation and resources.
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8. DEVELOP THE BUSINESS CASE Calculate the cost of implementing the different transition options. Identify all the tangible and non-tangible business benefits and cost them to produce a Return on Investment projection. You also need to consider the cost of the change management programme associated with the transition.
9. OTHER ISSUES THAT NEED TO BE CONSIDERED IN YOUR STRATEGY FOR GLOBAL ENTERPRISE Finally, when thinking about building a Global Transactional Content Management/ Processing strategy you also need to consider for each region: The culture, needs & blockers to the programme. The impact of the change on the local business processes and resources. The local and global Change Management programme that need to be put in place to handle: re-training, redeployment and communication across the regions.
BancTec offers a set of services & solutions that help clients in this domain. BancTec’s CenterVision solution is a leading Transactional Content Processing and Management Solution. The BancTec Services Delivery Methodology incorporates a set of methods, techniques, tools and services that help global organisations build effective Transactional Content Processing & Management solutions.
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