Farewell to the scanner?

What has become standard in many companies in recent years will soon be a thing of the past. This includes the process of "scanning incoming invoices and reading them out via OCR to forward them to an electronic approval workflow".

Invoices are increasingly being transmitted purely electronically. Paper is becoming obsolete. This development was made possible by the Tax Simplification Act passed in 2011.

Within just one year, the proportion of PDF invoices has already risen to ten to 15 percent. In five to ten years, the market for scanning solutions in the area of automatic invoice capture and classification will therefore no longer exist; almost 100 percent of incoming invoices will then arrive at the company digitally.

Companies' existing invoice receipt solutions with subsequent approval workflow are geared towards OCR recognition; functions for receiving and forwarding electronic invoices are offered at most as add-on components.

However, a contemporary approach should provide for moving the release workflow back to where it belongs - in the SAP system - and adapting all upstream processes to the circumstances.

This means installing an invoice reader that is no longer trimmed to OCR, but determines whether the delivered electronic format is valid and the invoice is valid, and then starts a dedicated approval workflow.

With KGS DocumentRouter, KGS has developed a solution that is the only one on the market to date that can process all input channels associated with IP transmission, including electronic invoices. The tool learns to handle new input formats and new channels based on the changed frame parameters.

If inbound documents are essentially available digitally in the future, the next question is: What added value can SAP users generate from them, or how can they be linked to SAP documents?

This is done by extracting the metadata from the electronic sources and using it to identify the relevant SAP business objects. The documents are then linked to these. In this way, a company achieves fully automated inbound processing with extremely high data quality - without scanning and OCR.

This is precisely the scenario with ZUGFerD invoices, for example: The structured data they contain can be extracted and linked to SAP transactions. The company can then make postings largely "in the dark," i.e., without further manual intervention.

Or the data is enriched with information to such an extent that the appropriate person in charge can already be determined and the corresponding workflow can be started.

The actual document or its data no longer has to be routed through SAP. Instead, the archiving system is addressed directly and only the metadata, i.e. the smallest piece of information, is passed on to SAP. The result is visibly less load generation.

Scan clients with new paper tasks

Scanning will by no means be completely eliminated, mind you. However, the tasks of a scanning solution will shift away from batch mass processing of invoices and delivery bills to specialized tasks.

The future task of scan clients will be to scan contract documents or customer correspondence quickly and spontaneously at the workplace. Until now, employees have always had to use the nearest multifunction printer (MFD).

Scanning components therefore move from the central inbox back to the clerk's workstation. Employees in the HR department or other key users have a scanner at their desk, while users with lower digitization needs continue to use their MFD, via which they scan paper originals.

They both need the scan client for simple image processing. The SAP integration of the scan client is important. It enables the filing in SAP at any objects via the SAP services to the object via right mouse button. The simultaneous filing in SAP is especially important for the new workplace scanning.

The KGS ScanClient therefore enables direct control and storage/archiving of scanned documents from the SAP GUI. In this way, centralized or decentralized incoming mail scenarios can be implemented.

For example, sensitive documents can be captured directly at the SAP workstation using a document scanner and automatically assigned to the corresponding SAP business object. Mass scanning with automatic barcode recognition or document capture for automatic forwarding to an SAP workflow are also easily possible.

Scan profile and license management

However, more scanners used by different occasional users also means more administration work. Support is provided here by scan servers, which can be used to manage scan profiles and licenses quickly and intuitively from a central location.

KGS has developed its KGS ScanServer for exactly this purpose. It manages the locally generated profiles in so-called profile groups. These can then be additionally assigned to any user with just a few mouse clicks.

New users are thus able to use existing profiles in no time at all. This eliminates the need for time-consuming resetting of scan profiles after a hardware replacement.

Automatic versioning means that all scan clients are always assigned the latest profiles in a "pull" process; manual distribution is not necessary. Scan licenses are managed per workstation and can be assigned or released easily and directly.

Parting not at any price

When it comes to accepting incoming information and processing it further, it is already clear today that the traditional approach of scanning and OCR will soon be obsolete. More and more documents are being received electronically and can therefore be processed automatically and linked to internal processes.

In the future, scanning solutions will therefore be used primarily at individual workstations to handle special tasks. Scanning will then no longer be done by the full-time professional at the high-performance scanner, but by the occasional user at the workstation scanner.

To avoid increased administration effort, the use of special scan servers is recommended. With them, scan profiles and licenses can be managed quickly and intuitively from a central location.