Image Is Everything

Continued

STEP 3: Expand Your Business Case—Compliance, Going Green, and the Real Cost of Paper

While reducing the cost of financial processes is a compelling argument, compliance efforts and improving the accuracy of financial transactions may be even more compelling. By their nature, manual and paper-based processes are harder to track, monitor, and report on. Their ad hoc nature alone can bring scrutiny from internal and external auditors.

For those organizations evaluating imaging, the ability to enforce repeatable processes, find supporting information for any document from anywhere across the process, and implement cost-effective document retention policies can help strengthen the business case. And, because the information is electronic instead of physical, it can be accessed simultaneously from several locations for several purposes.

While paper is still a large part of today's business, "going green" is a key initiative for many organizations. Beyond the important ethical and public relations benefits of green initiatives, the financial impact on facilities is instantly apparent— especially for larger organizations that maintain facilities in-house or outsource the storage of paper documents. Simply put, the cost associated with storing an image on a hard disk is infinitely smaller than the cost to store and ensure the security and integrity of paper-based documents.

STEP 4: Beyond the Quick Wins—Finance as a Case Study for Cost Reduction

Financial processes are the sweet spot for imaging and process management technologies. Customers using the combined Oracle Financials and Oracle Imaging and Process Management solution have seen benefits ranging from reductions of invoice processing from US$33 to US$2.75, invoice-to-pay reductions from 80 days to 24 hours, and ROI savings in the US$100,000 range during the first year. One of the customers seeing such gains in financials process improvements is New Plan Excel Realty Trust, which is using Oracle's comprehensive content management solution to manage essentially all of its enterprise content. According to Robert Lieberman, senior vice president and chief information officer for New Plan Excel Realty Trust, "With invoices coming directly to a central office for management within the system, we can automatically reduce the time it takes to process an invoice by 10 to 20 percent. The ease of routing invoices for approval and payment, combined with the system's integration with our JD Edwards applications, further accelerates the process—enabling us to pay invoices within approximately 7 to 10 days, instead of our previous 30-day average."

But finance isn't the only area that can benefit. The adoption of imaging within finance can be a catalyst to cost savings within horizontal line-of-business processes like human resources for employee onboarding or benefits documentation and vertical processes including

• Claims processing: streamlined data gathering and parallel processing
• Loan/mortgage processing: centralized portfolio management
• Lease/contract management: formalized contract review cycles
• Account opening: process acceleration and error reduction
• Higher education: transcript and application management

Finally, imaging and process management provides organizations with peace of mind in a worst-case scenario: disaster recovery. Says Sancho Pinto, principal product manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware's content management imaging solution:

"There are many reasons to consider Oracle for imaging, including the native integrations with Oracle's business applications and ability to scale up and meet all of an organization's imaging requirements. One particular customer sticks in my mind. The CIO was pushing the lines of business to scan documents and image-enable their applications, but reasons not to do it kept coming up. Then a tornado hit one of their main buildings. No one was hurt, but they were picking up documents for days, some of them confidential, all of them critical. When the dust settled—literally—they were lined up at the CIO's door asking when they could start their imaging projects."