The Benefits of Thinking Small.
Think Big, sure. But don’t forget to think Small.
Yes, you read that right – think small!
In the search for efficiency improvements and cost savings, we often think big. That’s fine, we should. It would be remiss not to plan ahead, allow for growth, search out step-change opportunities, and future-proof your processes and systems.
However, in the rush to see the bigger picture and find the shiny new optimal automated, enterprise-ready, integrated, smart, line-of-business (you get the idea – lots of buzzwords) solution, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there are almost always some pretty impressive process and/or efficiency improvements – and therefore cost savings - hidden right in front of us.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard operators and managers say things like:
- ‘oh when Document Type A comes in we scan it twice as we need two sets of indexing’
- ‘we copy and paste the Supplier Name and then look it up in our Supplier database and then copy the Supplier Reference back to validation’
- ‘we have to add ‘BF’ to each reference field in validation’
The list goes on and on. I’m sure these types of comment are familiar to anybody who has used a document capture system for any length of time.
Now here is where thinking small comes in…
Assume an average non-skilled operator costs around £10/$15 per hour.
A full time employee (FTE) works around 7.5 hours per day, for around 225 days per year.
This gives a relatively low estimate of the annual cost of a single FTE of around 7.5 x 10 x 225… or around £16,875/$25,313.
In reality the cost of training, sick pay, benefits, and other associated expenses mean that the true cost of an FTE is significantly higher.
Assume now that you are processing documents, lots of them. Let’s say 10,000 a week.
You realise that there is something you do manually to most of your documents – say 80% of them – which takes just 4 seconds. Doesn’t seem like a big deal? But wait, that’s 8,000 x 4 x 52 = 1,664,000 seconds of effort per year, or 61.6 days.
That’s an incredible £4,622/$6,933 of labour. Every year. Just for that one manual fix. And as we all know, there will be plenty more of them lurking in our processes.
If only your capture system allowed you to make small changes via scripts, or with workflow agents, and custom modules. Oh wait, it does… you just never bothered because the users only have to do that 4 second fix anyway, so it never seemed worth the effort.
And adding custom functionality takes ages right?
Wrong!
There are a number of small changes that you can make yourself with Recognition and Validation scripts within Kofax Capture, and there are tools you can buy which add these types of improvements and pay for themselves in a matter of months.
See our beginners guide to Recognition and Validation scripts to learn how to add scripting to your Kofax Capture system. And for those not ready, willing or able to write their own scripts, check out the custom components which can add custom functionality to your system with minimal technical effort.
Back to blog list