In today's economic climate, organizations are constantly looking for opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Organizations see the elimination of paper as an area that can yield an immediate return on investment (ROI). Heavily paper-based business processes provide some of the best opportunities for cost reduction and efficiency increases. Information capture can play an integral part in the optimization of business processes, as it speeds the conversion of unstructured information - whether that information is found on paper, in email and fax communications, and in PDF and XML files feeding operational systems. Information capture automatically groups and extracts business-critical information from incoming transactional documents and improves the integration with back-end systems and business processes. Information capture will reduce the amount of paper an organization will handle in the course a normal business day.
In April 2012, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact (TEI) and potential ROI that enterprises might realize by deploying IBM's Datacap Taskmaster Capture solution. Datacap is a full-featured capture platform that enables an organization to build and implement solutions for automating the digitization of paper documents. Datacap provides technologies for automated document identification, extraction of data by OCR, ICR, OMR and barcodes, automated data validation, an ergonomic GUI for editing and keying from images, and delivery of images and data in a variety of formats to enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and databases. For a more detailed overview of the Datacap solution, please refer to page 17. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Datacap on their organizations.