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Digital Imaging Replacing Paper at Viral Speed
While ERP applications are mature in many organizations, paper content still plays a role in many high-transaction operations, including procure-to-pay, expense management, and employee benefits processing. The results are productivity losses related to slower transaction processing and the likelihood of human errors. It also increases hard costs related to paper storage and transportation.
But current technologies that replace paper—digital imaging—are so easy to use and offer such clear cost and productivity benefits that they’re spreading with viral speed through the business environment. Manual processes surrounding or in support of ERP processes are a prime targets for imaging quick wins.
“One of the key advantages to integrating imaging within the context of business applications is that there’s almost no learning curve for users,” says Stephen Schleifer, product manager for Oracle Content Management. “It facilitates quick adoption because it focuses on augmenting, not altering, the existing business process.”
“It’s a simple concept with clear business value that is repeatable in many different areas of an organization,” says Schleifer. “The majority of our customers start with accounts payable because invoice processing is one of the highest transaction areas in a business. But then they move to other financial applications like time and expense or contracts, or even into other lines of business like human resources or customer service.”
Oracle Imaging and Process Management, a part of Oracle’s Content Management suite of products, digitizes paper content and inserts it into enterprise workflows to optimize business operations. It currently offers out-of-the-box integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and JD Edwards—integrations that are loosely coupled on the back end to ensure that financial systems maintain their integrity without requiring hard coding with the imaging system, while being transparently integrated on the front end to ensure user uptake.
Oracle Imaging and Process Management is designed to be used as an imaging platform, offering a central image repository that can be leveraged organizationwide. Use cases can be expanded to a range of applications without requiring a separate infrastructure or administration tools. “The benefits to image-enabling applications are so quickly evident, that inevitably one department head speaks to another about how it’s helped to achieve process optimization, and soon that department head will knock on IT’s door asking when imaging can be integrated with their system,” says Schleifer. “The effect is viral.”
Oracle Imaging and Process Management 10gR3 is now available for download on Oracle Technology Network. As a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Imaging and Process Management will provide the default image technology repository for Fusion Applications, designed to be leveraged wherever imaging services are needed within the enterprise.
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