Whitepapers

Abstract

This white paper examines the challenges that businesses face with their existing paper-based document management methods. The paper also demonstrates how Lexmark distributed capture solutions enable employees in distributed office environments to efficiently and securely manage time-sensitive information within today’s complex business processes.

Even with the ability to transmit documents electronically, the paperless office has yet to become a reality. Inevitably, there are times when hardcopy documents created by outside sources need to be incorporated with digital documentation―for example, invoices, expense reports, medical records, contracts, legal documents, or documents that contain original signatures. With a distributed capture solution, both digital and hardcopy documents can be managed efficiently.

Distributed capture is defined as a workgroup solution that gives users at dispersed locations the ability to scan, capture and save documents in a highly secure digital format. The electronic document can then be automatically distributed via e-mail or fax, through a file transfer to a shared server folder or directory, or delivered directly into an enterprise application.

There are many cost benefits of capturing documents in real time, at the point of use, rather than using a traditional centralized scanning approach. These include: 

• Elimination of costs for bundling, shipping, sorting, scanning and indexing documents at a central scanning facility
• Immediate availability of files, forms and data
• Reduced cycle time of transactional documents
• Reduced storage costs
• Improved compliance

Introduction

Many companies now understand the importance of implementing an output management system as part of their printing infrastructure as this lowers costs and waste while increasing security and user efficiency. Two major functions in any output management system are the ability for the user to securely print their job to any device (“pull print”) and for the job to be printed on the most suitable printer (“job routing”)

While most multi-functional devices come with some secure printing functions included as standard, these do not allow the user to walk to a different device to retrieve the job or authenticate with a door entry card. There are no such job routing functions built into the device, so these must always be added by use of software.

There are several products on the market that offer enhanced pull printing type systems. All of these appear to offer a similar user workflow: The user prints a job, walks to the multifunctional device of their choice, authenticates and selects the jobs they want to release. Similarly, most of these systems also offer job routing functionality where the user will print a job to their normal printer and the system will offer the user a choice tomove it to more appropriate and cheaper device if certain conditions are met.

However, there is a major problem with most pull printing and job routing systems when multiple MFD types are used, even from the same manufacturer, as these may not be compatible with each other. This could result in the user not getting the printout they originally requested, or worse still, no print out at all.

There is one system that is different – uniFLOW Output Manager. By using its own universal driver technology the user can be confident that they will get the printout they expect, regardless of make or model of the MFD. 

Executive Summary

Every day, organizations receive high volumes of various types of documents through the mail, fax and email that launch different internal business processes. Reviewing and interpreting these documents, entering data from them, and forwarding them on to others for further processing consumes company time and resources, which increases operating costs and negatively impacts customer and supplier responsiveness. A digital mailroom powered by enterprise-level capture technology solves these problems by converting incoming mail, fax and email into structured electronic information that feeds multiple downstream business processes, systems and repositories across the enterprise. It does this using the enabling technologies of classification, separation, extraction, validation and delivery automation. 

In almost every organization there are accounting, human resources, purchasing, contract management and customer service processes. In addition, there are vertical market-specific processes, such as insurance claims processing, mortgage processing, electronic health records management, new bank account opening, case management in government, and so on. In many cases an electronic infrastructure and electronic workflow are used to orchestrate the complex sequence of steps required to complete the process, but the process cannot start until the required information is captured from incoming business documents.

This white paper overviews how modern capture enabled business processes can transform traditional incoming document reception and processing into an efficient ”digital mailroom” that helps organizations reduce costs, drive process efficiency, and improve customer service and market competitiveness.

Background Information

Technology advances sometimes come in unexpected places. To most of us, the black powder we have been adding to copiers and printers for the last sixty years doesn’t seem to have changed very much. It certainly looks the same. But looks can be deceiving. As a result of sixty years of research and thousands of patents, today’s toners flow better, store better, fuse better, and develop more efficiently, resulting in cleaner, better looking prints. But under the surface, other technological advances in toner design have also enabled better, less expensive, and safer photoreceptor and fuser materials not to mention faster and cleaner operating machines. The newest advancement in toner technology is EA Toner.

What is EA Toner?

EA Toner is chemical toner prepared by Emulsion Aggregation, or a chemical process used to “grow” very small, uniform particle sizes from even smaller (sub-micron) size toner components. The EA process can deliver the desired size and narrow particle size distribution required for excellent color image quality. This small size and the relative uniformity of all the particles in a particular “batch” of EA Toner is more predictable than the conventional mechanical process of pulverizing extruded plastic for toner. It is also less energy intensive. Emulsion refers to the synthetic chemical process to form latex toner resin and aggregation means to bring the toner ingredient’s particles together to form the desired particle size and spherical shape.

How is it different from other toners?

The conventional toner manufacturing process, consists of starting with just the right plastic, melt mixing in pigment and special ingredients, and pulverizing the resulting block of composite plastic to a fine powder. Finally, the powder still has to be processed to remove oversized chunks and ultra fine particles. This multistep process results in non-uniform angular particles with a somewhat wide size and shape distribution. As amazing as the resulting toners were, to step up to the challenges that each new generation of xerography required, the manufacturing process still limited engineers in creating toner with all the capabilities they wanted.