The Open Source landscape is filled with dynamic activity and incredible opportunities today. Some of the ways in which Open Source is being used include –
1. Enterprise level applications
2. Social, extranet, and intranet portals
3. Content management and Search Systems
4. Insights and Analytics Systems for your business
Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is one such successful business application of Open Source. The ECM ecosystem is dotted with the below trends, challenges and priorities –
- ECM Trends – Most of the solutions today are of hybrid nature and look to integrate with existing business applications without a drop in the value provided by these systems. Its key focus today is on supporting the mobile user segment and monitoring governance issues.
- ECM Challenges – Lack of storage in this age of data explosion and its subsequent difficulty in searching for content in this pile of information is the major challenge today. Vulnerability to information leak is another challenge that needs to be met head-on
- ECM Priorities – The top priority is to eliminate these vulnerabilities and drive better user engagement. ECM systems also need to transform existing processes as per shifts in preferences and technology evolution.
Some of the essentials that needs to be supported by an ECM include –
- Versatility of business applications support
- Provide a blend of performance, speed and multi user support
- Provide ‘any-time’, ‘any-where’ user experience across devices on various areas of collaboration
- Have a secure credential based environment to share, extract, access and edit information online
- Should integrate a powerful search functionality that support granular search
- Storage, archival, and backup should scale up based on customers’ growth
- Digitization should be made easy
- Should possess a near real time support system
These essentials will help increase the value proposition of ECM in various fields such as
- Workflow, Business Process Management
- Document and Knowledge Management
- Web Content Management
- Records Management
- Cross department Collaboration
While there are many ECM solutions available today, very few have managed to compete with the scalability, robustness, and cost effectiveness of Alfresco. This open source ECM solution gives total control to your stakeholders in form of ‘any-time’, ‘any-where’ experience across multiple devices, multiple choice of apps, and multiple platforms.
Enterprise Integrated Document Capture (EIDC) and its importance in the financial sector
EIDC holds tremendous potential for the financial sector in two key areas
- Bringing efficiency in managing humongous piles of documents
- Providing economies of scale and elevating accuracy with help of automation
Some of the other advantages on offer from EIDC include -
- Regulatory and statutory compliance for BPM
- Cross department and multi-agency collaboration ease
EIDC Architecture
A strong suite of EIDC solution can be built using Alfresco (for storage, access, and retrieval of enterprise content) and Ephesoft (for processing paper, scanned, and electronic documents). In this architecture Ephesoft ensures well organized document capture from different sources such as scanners and file system documents. This follows the below steps
- Scanning and sorting of documents
- Indexing
- Validation and monitoring
- Release to Alfresco
- Exporting and Reporting
For this architecture to provide a seamless and robust performance, there are a few pre-requisites that need to be followed –
- Pre-define a strategic Alfresco model
- Configure mapping with Alfresco in Ephesoft
- Configure batch class / workflow in Ephesoft
Advantages of the System
While the Alfresco + Ephesoft EIDC system has all the benefits offered by other proprietary systems, the interesting point to note is the amount of benefits available with this architecture that is not present in any other system. Some of these include
- Fuzzy databas
- Cursive handwriting processing
- Provision of Thin Client
- Custom themes to application
Also interesting to note is the immense TCO savings offered by this system. When compared to others, the Alfresco + Ephesoft EIDC system provides a cost reduction of an incredible 90% over a 2-3 year period.
Document capture in BFSI sector
Document capture is more pronounced and complex in the BFSI sector, calling for advanced data extraction. This is why a combination of ECM and document capture is preferred to maintain the business processes and workflow, along with supporting distributed capture across branches, agencies, and teams.
These needs have given rise to various challenges such as increased instances and coverage of automation. It should offer the triple advantage of value across divisions, speed of executing tasks, as well as, lowering cost overheads. These challenges can be addressed by elevating the efficacy of collaboration, embracing mobility and cloud and ensuring automated classification.
This is precisely where the world renowned competencies of Ephesoft comes into play. It’s advanced capture and unstructured document data discovery technologies provide value to multiple domains:
- Banks & Credit Unions, Mortgage Lenders, and Insurance Companies
- Healthcare
- Government agencies
Its thin client architecture, ready to use integration, CMIS compliance, provision of RESTful APIs, and cloud delivery support makes this architecture a must have for your BFSI company.
You can download the presentation describing the Open Source Enterprise Integrated Document Capture (EIDC) and ECM Solution for Financial Sector. To know more, do connect with us at CIGNEX .
