Digital transformation has become essential for every organization. But success rates can be as low as 4% for projects in some industries. Digitizing a process depends on how effectively you deal with data at both ends of that process. The latest IDG MarketPulse report, Enterprise Fax with Capture Technology, reveals that as volumes grow, organizations are struggling to effectively capture and convert fax data.
Put simply, digital transformation requires that you extract data from content at the beginning of the process and seamlessly create a document at the end. To do so, you need a technology solution that can automatically capture and extract data sources from email attachments, faxes, or paper and intelligently route that data into your back-end systems to enable end-to-end processing. Yet the findings from the IDG survey show that for the majority of organizations, the capture and extraction of fax-based data is mostly manual.
Fax volumes are growing
For many organizations, fax capture represents a growing challenge as fax volumes continue to increase across a wide range of business processes. According to IDG, the volume of content from digital fax has grown by 76%, with 86% of respondents expecting a further increase over the next 2 years. These volumes have increased significantly from a similar IDG survey two years ago when the figures were 27% and 25% respectively.
Remarkably, 44% of respondents still use paper-based fax and a quarter of those users expect the volume of paper fax to increase.
The research also demonstrates just how widespread fax adoption is across an enterprise. It remains at the heart of document-based business processes, from invoicing to HR records to patient information.
However, without effective capture technology, valuable data can remain trapped within the fax. Today, the response across many business processes is to manually extract and re-key information into enterprise systems. The IDG survey found that processes for capturing legal content are mostly or completely manual at 64% of organizations – an interesting statistic considering that improving the handling of legal information was a major driver in the original development of digital fax.
Focus on fax capture
With so much fax content still handled manually, it’s no surprise that respondents placed human error, poor productivity and security as their main challenges. In all, 98% of those surveyed stated that they were looking for ways to improve their handling of fax-based content – and, when its features were described to them, 82% thought that fax capture technology would be valuable to their organization.
The leading fax capture solutions, such as OpenText™ Intelligent Capture, automatically accept and interpret fax documents from a variety of different sources – such as fax servers, cloud fax accounts, multi-function devices and fax machines – to text documents or structured data. This enables extracted data in the correct format to flow directly and securely into your back-end systems.
Using the latest intelligent character recognition (ICR), intelligent document recognition (IDR) and adaptive reading technologies, a fax capture solution can provide incredibly high levels of accuracy and can self-learn to continually improve performance over time. This enables the fax capture solution to effectively deal with structured and unstructured data wherever it appears in a document.
As the IDG research shows, fax capture technology releases the full power of digital fax for organizations that are digitizing and automating their business processes. It delivers that vital first step to achieve successful digital transformation.
Download your copy of IDG Market Pulse: Enterprise Fax with Capture Technology to learn more.
