Digital transformation (DX) is holding a mirror up to legacy capture solutions and reflecting a face as antiquated as the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel — the oldest-known animal sculpture, circa 35,000 BC. Legacy capture platforms that require big professional services dollars and months of integration planning to stand up, are taking a backseat to smarter solutions that figured out a long time ago that to stay ahead of the DX curve you have to be truly agile and keep your Swagger.
Taking DX agility to the next level, we start to move away from the one person or one team in the organization who owns development, which extends the time to value even further by keeping tribal knowledge locked down. In this new era of DX, we see a shift to citizen developers, Swagger/OpenAPIs and Capture-as-a-Service (CaaS) platforms. We move to partnerships designed for progress that drives greater return on investment (ROI) to our customers by working together in a way that the Lion Man of Hohlenstein Stadel could never have fathomed. One example of this “better together” partnering is realized with Ephesoft’s partnership with Infor.
Through this strategic partnership, Infor has added Ephesoft’s powerful, smart document classification and data extraction functionality to their document management (IDM) application to help customers automatically capture content vital to their business. Ephesoft’s technology eliminates the need to manually sort documents and enter information. Any time you can take keystrokes out of a process you benefit from a reduction in errors, faster daily operations and a more auditable business processes. Accuracy, productivity and efficiency are obvious outcomes.
How did the evolution of DX make business processes better?
It certainly wasn’t accomplished with legacy capture or a bloated platform. On the contrary, best-of-breed, innovative tools using AI-based, supervised machine learning tools have elevated the playing field. Solutions like Ephesoft provide an intelligent document onramp to export data and files into Content Services platforms like Infor’s Document Management, M3 Servers and ION servers. Ephesoft Transact enables mapping of the extracted data which allows machine-printed and hand-printed text to be converted into digital formats, thereby diversifying the type of information that can be utilized through the application for a more complete document capture process. We create the XML specifically for Infor IDM and we send the XML to the IDM web service. Simply put, the integration passes XML streams between the applications.
Now let’s apply this solution to a real-world problem and widen our scope.
Now let’s apply this solution to a real-world problem and widen our scope.Virtually every organization has an Accounts Payable department and processes invoices as a lifeline to conduct business. Automating invoice processing is one of the fastest ways to achieve ROI. Knowledge workers are processing incoming invoices, whether they are coming in as paper or in an email attachment, and matching those invoices to purchase orders, correlating those documents to the proper suppliers and checking to see if the values are correct across the board. The process encompasses many moving parts, tons of keystrokes and plenty of opportunity for error. Accounting departments need more control over this process to make better decisions and to get this information to the right people quickly. In fact, we’ve seen our customers not only streamline their AP process, reduce costs and improve accuracy, but they have also turned their department into a profit center with the ability to capitalize on rebates, on-time payments and dynamic discounting.
Through Infor’s partnership with Ephesoft, IDM Capture is an add-on product to the Infor® Document Management component of Infor OS that extends Ephesoft’s robust platform for customers worldwide. By providing the ability to retrieve supporting documentation directly from the application in use, the platform reduces errors, time and cost of invoice processing. What we’re finding is that this pervasive capture is typically just the starting point for digital transformation. Since the documents handled in Accounts Payable touch so many departments, these solutions quickly become a multiplier of DX success.
Hold a mirror up to this and you’ll see a brilliant, lucrative reflection of an agile organization turning unstructured content into actionable data. Instead of looking as weathered as a Lion Man, you’ll reflect an image of a leading company utilizing innovative, AI-based technology that helps to take you and your customers to the next level.
About Ephesoft and Infor
Infor Document Management, in partnership with Ephesoft, helps customers work more efficiently by automatically connecting documents to core business processes within Infor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.
Additional resources:
Ephesoft Transact + Infor Case Study: Sytemair
Infor Document Management with Ephesoft
