SaaS & BPM

Copmaines are taking SaaS offering as an alternative delivery model for BPM solution offering. The claims processing applicationa in finanical services and helatcare industries is the most common example.
The most common use of SaaS is in providing the business process model as an user interface of cahnge across all phases of process lifecycle. The business analyst from client companies can directly change process flows ,rule definitions and user intefaces via modelling environment.
At present most comapnies focus on on premises implementation of BPM rather than go for SaaS supported solutions. The proceses supported by SaaS are often not included in process improvment efforts.

The companies like Appian ,Lombardi and Metastorm are offering the business process modelling via SaaS model. Appian and Fujtisu has also tried hands on BPM solution through SaaS model.The Reasons for SaaS not taking off are following

• The agility of process modelling and process reenigneering is compromised in the SaaS model as SaaS is low cost model for accessing (not owning) the functionality.
• The predefined range of rules ,process flows and user interfaces doesnot make it enticing for an organization inclined to use BPM as process improvement and optimization tool.

How to best Utilize SaaS for BPM ?

The organizations should adopt SaaS for processea which are well define din the organization. The users should be able to see the BPM artifacts of SaaS model and share their understanding and suggestions with SaaS provider for developing customized SaaS BPM scenario. The comapnies should implement SaaS understanding the their objectives of implementation based on set of well defined KPI'S. The need for changes in processes should be clearly articulated with SaaS provider.

SaaS can be implemented intelligently for BPM solutions to achieve low cost business scenario .The organozations should understand the limit of implementing SaaS based model. The use of SaaS based model for Business process improvement and optimization has still a long way to go.

Asset Managemnet using BPM

BPM provides a collaborative platform for designing and executing a workflow for the asset management of the company. The company used BPM for designing and implementing workflow for taking care of infrastructure and maintenance needs of company. The workflow was connected through sales and logistics database as well as infrastructure database. The typical process started with the request from a particular wholesale branch for increase in infrastructure assets or request for maintenance. The requisition was sent for approval to the competent authority in head office for infrastructure approval .The checklist was embedded in workflow which pulls out data from infrastructure database of last maintenance work /infrastructure enhancement .The request for new infrastructure/maintenance is also goes for approval to the sales head responsible for that area .The checklist for sales approval involves pulling out data from sales data bases in terms of increase in sales and subsequent increase in logistics cost. The additional information that needs to be put in is loss of sales due to lack of infrastructure/maintenance. The request when approve by both sales and infrastructure authority .The request is then sent to the region head for approval. The region head if approves the process it automatically triggers the process of calling tenders from third party vendors listed in the company. The communication is send to all the vendors via email asking them to respond with quotation within fifteen days. As soon as all the vendors place their quotations or then the processes of short listing tenders is triggered and the mail is send to all the tender committee members for which queue has already been created in the BPM platform. The members approve the tender of one particular vendor . The process of sending mail to the vendors is initiated stating tender process is closed and the name of vendor selected for work. The vendor who has been awarded work can send his bill via email which again triggers account payable processes which involves verification of task ,quality of task and approval for payment.

BPM and SOX Compliance

Compliance requirements in Sarbanes-Oxley

SOX has 2 important sections 302 and 404

• S 302 requires executives to personally certify the validity of financial statements
• S 404 requires complete documentation of financial controls and evaluation
  

Self-certification of internal controls and legal compliance requires an organization-wide compliance initiative as the managers of each function need to assess and certify the effectiveness of processes and controls that they are responsible for.

BPM enables organizations to address these requirements through document management features for creating a Compliance Framework, Compliance Workflows and Reporting and Monitoring.

Compliance Framework

BPM helps organizations to create a robust, scalable compliance framework consisting of:

• Owners and participants in the compliance initiative
  
• Risk Assessment procedures with Processes, risks and controls that are to be used for self-assessment
  
• Test Plans that are to be used to verify the operating effectiveness of controls
  
• Issues and Recommendations that are detected and defined during self-assessment
  
• Legal Compliance through management of tasks that require fulfillment of legal provisions under various acts
  
  

Compliance workflows

BPM facilitates collaboration by enabling execution of workflows for the following compliance activities:

• Self-assessment of design effectiveness and operational effectiveness of controls
• Workflows that enable tracking of issues and remediation plans to address flaws in controls
• Legal Compliance workflows to enable fulfillment of legal requirements
  

Reporting and Monitoring:

Before CEO/CFOs can certify the existence and effectiveness of controls, they need to view the results and status of the compliance initiative. BAM and Analytics provide powerful graphical dashboards and drill-down reports that enable CEO, CFO and managers to view the current status of assessment tasks and control effectiveness.

Risk Management in BPM

Business organizations are increasingly using business process management as an essential ingredient in adopting to agile business environment for optimizing the process and maximizing the profits .The business processes management covers the lifecycle of processdiscovery ,specification ,implementation ,execution ,monitoring and controlling.BPM projects are structured around the business needs of organization and often fail because of lack of risk management .The cost of failures is high as the impact is felt across the organization .

Different Phases of BPM Lifecycle
Process Discovery
The lifecycle typically begins with discovery of the processes for the business needs of organization. The requirements of the business needs are gathered and the process involved with ach needs are elaborated in this phase.
Process Design
The business ecosystem is elaborated in this phase with various processes and sub processes inside it. The overall business scenario is designed embedding in it parent and child workflows. The exception processes are also enumerated at different steps of processes to take care of exceptions .
Process Implementation
The process designed is now has to be implemented across the organization . This begins with educating training the end user about the process. The real life scenarios are visualized and the end users are trained to use the process to fulfill business needs of organization.
Process Execution
This phase deals with executing the process for fulfilling the business needs across the organization.
Analysis and Monitoring
The processes are not monitored for the performance and fulfillment of business needs. The KPI and business reports are generated at this stage.
Controlling Process & Reengineering
The bottlenecks in the process are identified and the processes are reengineered to optimize them and increase profitability.

Identifying Risks associated with BPM
The typical risks encountered in BPM projects are mismatch of methods employed at different phases of process lifecycle ,lake of clarity for responsibility for different phases and mismatch of process design ,automation and evaluation objectives.
The identification of risks helps BPM process mangers to address risks related to different phases and avoid failure of projects. The typical risks at various phases are
Process Discovery
The shortsightedness in foreseeing the business processes as part of business ecosystem result in crucial small processes missing .The different in opinion about the inclusion of processes in designing business ecosystem leads to conflict situation .The documentation is not having specified format resulting in improper documentation with scattered information which results in loss of knowledge.
Process Design
The designing of process needs some standard modeling language to be followed. The designing is often done with nonstandard language resulting in process semantics not being properly represented which makes it difficult to understand and implement. The lack of communication between process stakeholders and process designers is another area which leads to improper design of processes .The common mistake made by process designer is having process focus and ignore the organizational perspective of process .The risk handling mechanism is often missing in design.
Process Implementation
Processes are often implemented without educating the end user fully about the process. The training is also conducted in an abstract manner resulting in lack of knowledge in terms of implementation of process.
Process Execution
The stakeholders do not adopt to the process oriented work style and continue with informal approach to work. The system is unstable and error prone in the beginning leading to loss of confidence about process in end users. The new regulatory requirements need to many approval and become cumbersome for end users
Analysis and Monitoring
The monitoring strategies ,plans ,objectives and methods are not thought clearly in the beginning resulting lack of monitoring methodology. The stakeholders and regulations prohibit the transparency in the process .The quantitative perspective is lacking in monitoring. The end user fails to translate raw data in to useful information.
Controlling Process & Reengineering
The data is difficult to understand and cannot be translated in to useful information. The bottlenecks seems to arise from lack of knowledge making it difficult to identify the requirement for reengineering process.
Risk Mitigation
Risk management typically involves the identification of risks ,analyzing them and then mitigating risks. The following approach should be followed to mitigate the risks involved in various phases of BPM lifecycle
1. The documentation process should be well defined to document the processes discovered in discovery phase.
2. The scope of processes should be clearly defined in the beginning to avoid any transgression of business ecosystem
3. The process design phase should have Active involvement of process stakeholders to translate the process requirement in to process design.
4. The standard BPMN notations should be used for modeling to avoid any confusion among stakeholders about process.
5. The process designed should undergo a well defined review and approval process to avoid any mistakes.
6. The key persons responsible should have regular meeting to have clear understanding of processes going on.
7. The involvement of end user is necessary in the process management as he/she should feel himself/herself as part of it . The regular suggestion meetings and briefings bout process design will help this up.
8. The processes should be tested live in bets environment asking for inputs of end user before implementing them finally to avoid errors in real world scenario.
9. The training of end user should be scenario based detailing benefits of implementation of process making him feel the benefits of process.
10. The monitoring reports and KPI should be thought around the process in the beginning to avoid confusion while monitoring and analyzing.
Summary and Outlook
This paper has discussed the risks involved in BPM lifecycle and the ways to mitigate it. Risks are essential part of any processes and cannot be avoided but with careful forethought the risk can be mitigated to convert them as learning points in improving processes

Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) Approval workflow

Timely investments in assets and infrastructure are critical to support an organization’s growth. However, capital expenditure approvals are often protracted due to the following reasons:
1. Complex vendor selection processes including RFP submission and evaluations
2. Differences in policies based on expenditure type, location, business unit
3. Availability and access of information to budgeting systems
4. Multi-level, amount-based approvals
5. Time taken to transmit supporting documents such as vendor quotes, RFP responses, comparisons, blanket purchase orders
Risks of manual CAPEX approvals
Besides long approval cycles, manual CAPEX approvals are associated with the following risks:
1. Errors in approvals leading to approval of expenses outside the budget
2. Lack of transparency in vendor selection processes leading to collusion between vendors and internal members
3. Absence of an audit trail, especially in case of exceptions
4. Under or over utilization of budgets
5. Lack of standard and consistent application of approval policies across business units and locations

The following workflow is an example of a limit-based CAPEX approval system.
create workflow with these steps:
1. Department manager applies for approval. Selects items of capital expenditure and quantity required and period when required.
2. Workflow integrates with the ERP to check if capital expense is within the budget.
3. If the request is within budget, and amount is <> 25000, then it is forwarded to the Vice President Finance and Departmental Head. If request is outside budget, it is first forwarded to the departmental head for exception approval – see step 5.
4. If the Finance Manager and Head approve/ or VP Finance and Dept Head approve, the Purchasing workflow is initiated.
5. If Departmental Head substantiates the exception, it is forwarded to the VP-Finance for sanction and Purchasing Workflow is initiated.
Process Efficiencies with automated workflow
Process Efficiencies
1. Faster completion of approval process to ensure uninterrupted availability of critical infrastructure
2. Consistent application of approval processes
3. Clear audit trail evidenced by copies of all supporting documents, notes and comments
4. Comprehensive reporting from multiple perspectives - total sanctions, total variations from budgets, breakdown of requests by department, location, approver, requestor
5. Tighter controls at all stages to prevent collusion
6. Transparency in purchasing

Document Management Solution

Components of DMS
The components of DMS can be broadly divided in four parts
1. Document Capture and Storage
2. Document Work Flow
3. Business Rules for work flow
4. Analysis and Reporting on DMS

1. Document Capture and Storage

Batch Scanning
The format of incoming documents in an organization is difficult to control ; So it is important that document imaging systems are able to scan a mix of these documents in bulkPermanent and Accurate Storage Permanent and accurate storage deals with the conversion of hard-copy business documents such as invoices, statements and remittances into unalterable digital images. It is important that the images of accounting documents captured by the system are unalterable since they form a key part of the accounting records retained by the business. This means, for example, that even where document styles and layout change over the year that the original is a faithful copy. In addition, where matching with an accounting system identifies relationships between documents, for example a Purchase Order, a GRN (Goods Received Note) and Purchase Invoice it is important that the document management system retains this relationship when storing away the image so that the information is preserved and available if the accounting system is subsequently replaced. Using these relationships, a modern document imaging system should also present automatically related documents, such as an invoice and its associated purchase order and proof-of-delivery.

Intelligent Data Capture
Intelligent data capture is the cornerstone of a document management system and an area that has benefited from rapid advances in technology. This technology enables the automated capture of data from whole batches of incoming documents, such as supplier invoices, using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). It is vital that data capture technology can handle mixed batches of document types and sizes and recognises different fonts, layout and colours whilst intelligently interpreting the contents with a high degree of success by matching against valid data held within an integrated accounting system or other database. For example, using this technique, a supplier name or VAT registration number on a scanned purchase invoice could be matched with the supplier's account number held in the accounts payable module. Unmatched data should be clearly highlighted on screen so that operators can view the scanned image and correct the interpreted data where necessary so that future instances of the same document type can be scanned without delay.

Secure methods of data storage
Storing digital images within a document management system provides unique advantages over manual storage of paper documents, for example, space savings, fast document retrieval and ease of backup. But data storage has to be secure from unauthorised access, inadvertent or malicious changes, i.e. apply a similar level of user permissions to the original records as the accounting system itself. In addition, the system should avoid proprietary technology so that images can be transferred to alternative hardware configurations as the organisation grows.

2. Document Work Flow
The documents in an organisation have workflows attached to them for example if we consider an invoice it is generated ,checked for essential information ,goes for approval ,approved ,email /sms notification send to concerned department for payment ,the approved invoice is archived. The ability for approvers to append ‘sticky notes' on the electronic document, without affecting the original image whilst enabling the accounts administrator to track the whereabouts of individual documents should be available.

3.Business Rules for work flow
The flow of a document in an organisation is governed by simple rules for example there may be rules for approval of invoice based on financial power of designation like up to Rs 100 approval can be done by clerk ,from 100-5000 by section officer ,from 5000 -50000 by accountant and so on. These rules if nested in the work flow are very useful in automation of whole process.

4.Analysis and Reporting on DMS

The audit trail and reports on the documents helps to monitor the cost involved ,speed and accuracy of work. Any DMS should be able to generate the reports regarding the documentation carried out for example for invoices a report should be available giving details of number of incoming invoices ,withheld for approval ,approved ,rejected .The other important thing is that at any particular instance the end user should be able to know the status of particular document .This also helps in resource optimization as well as removing bottlenecks from system making it more efficient

Why bpm tool is needed after MOSS 2007 ?

Why bpm tool is needed after MOSS 2007 ?
The workflow created inside SharePoint designer are not reusable and bound to list. The conditional logic that can be applied to workflows is limited. There is no ability to debug. The escalation of the processes cannot be configured in the workflow which typically means that if there is one manager which has to approve leave and if he is absent you can not timestamp the process to go to next level of senior manager for approval after specified period of time.The designing of multi-step workflow with visual studio is difficult. The robust audit and metric data has to be build up .Moreover the integration with other platforms must be built form scratch.The other limitation is the use of ASPX pages is must and the limited customizability of ASPX form

DMS in e-Governance

DMS in e-Governance

Out of the many sectors that document management finds application in, e-Governance continues to be the most critical. Good governance not only demands consistent and transparent application of laws and procedures, it mandates that the records that form the evidence for every transaction are readily available and accessible to all. Document Management for e-Governance is especially critical considering the following:

1. Government has the largest number of stakeholders as compared to any vertical – the constituency it serves. Underlying documents for every transaction need to be available to every constituent.
2. Government transactions must not only be above board but must be proven to be so. Good document management solutions make government processes transparent.
3. Accessibility of information - Considering the number and geographic spread of its constituents, electronic document management is the only way of making information accessible to all constituents simultaneously.
4. Costs – Government processes need to be efficient, lean and cost effective. An effective document management system drastically reduces costs of processing.
5. Right to information – Many countries have introduced legislation that enforce a citizen’s right to information. Timely release of documents and information in response to citizen requests requires an effective document management system.
6. Security – It is essential that access to classified documents that impact national security is regulated by appropriate security policies. An effective document management system minimizes possibilities of security breach.

DMS has to be customized to meet the above requirements and cater file movement across different departments of Government. The DMS should be able to cater following processes with respect to document filing system in government.
• Efficient tracking of Files and Documents
• Prevents files from being lost and misplaced
• Eases monitoring and tracking
• Automates office communication
• Provides for escalation procedures
• Incorporates audit trails at user, folder and document levels
• Improves inter and intra departmental communication and collaboration
• Reduces paperwork leading to enhancement in service delivery levels, and increases responsiveness and departmental productivity.

Benefits from a BPM Implementation

Tangible Benefits from a BPM Implementation

Business organizations are using BPM for different reasons and in different forms. BPM has an overall impact on the business ecosystem resulting in cost savings across the processes inside business ecosystem. The cost savings from different cost categories are:

Reduced labour costs

BPM focuses on optimization of processes. The processes that are repetitive are optimized and lead to reduction in labour which translates to immediate cost savings. For example, by automating a task that requires six hours of manual intervention, one can expect to cut that time to half. Thus, three hours multiplied by the number of times the process is completed in a cycle will yield significant cost saving.

Increased Productivity

BPM tries to identify the best process for achieving desired end results. The automation of processes that need manual intervention leads to increased productivity with the same resources. Increase in productivity results in higher revenues, better resource utilization and further savings in costs.

Shorter Cycle Times

Automation of processes leads to less time in completion. The time saving yields significant cost savings in terms of optimized resource utilization. Shorter cycles also mean that more instances of the same process can be completed in the same time. For example, if the time for processing an invoice is halved, the number of invoices processed not only doubles, but the cost per invoice halves as well.

Increased Profits
BPM automation of processes that impact revenue generation have an immediate and significant impact on revenues. For example, an improvement in sales processes is likely to improve lead conversion rates and consequently revenues.

Intangible Benefits

BPM implementations often result in numerous intangible benefits that translate into tangible savings in costs and increased revenues in the long run. Intangible benefits range from improved processes, better quality, higher employee morale and better decision making.

Reduced Error Handling
Automation of processes reduces errors due to human intervention. The reduction in errors saves the time of rework and improves quality of processes as well.

Consistent Process Handling
Consistency comes from having an established procedure and ensuring this procedure is followed every time. BPM has additional advantage of enforcing these procedures by automating routine tasks, which otherwise might complete frequently with flawed procedure.

Improved Customer Service
BPM makes customer service more responsive in terms of handling complaints, by automating the process of handling grievances and providing better service.

Easier Management of IT Infrastructure
Application integration which is one of the most powerful phases of BPM leads to reductions in IT management and administration time, development time and costs, and lower support costs.

The Need for BPM Tools

With business needs changing rapidly in the face of global economic scenarios, organizations continue to be pressed with the necessity to align business processes with market requirements to be competitive. BPM (Business Process Management) has therefore evolved into a collaborative platform to automate and monitor business processes The ease with which processes can be monitored, analyzed and remodelled for optimization makes BPM an important component of organization strategy. However, many organizations struggle to quantify the benefits from a BPM implementation. In this whitepaper, we examine the business benefits and cost saving that an organization experiences from BPM implementations and how they may be measured.

BPM as a Process Enabler

Global business organization consists of business ecosystem with different processes. The basic value of business unit within an organization is the need to streamline business operations, consolidate organization, and reduce the cost. Business organizations are increasingly relying on virtual project teams spanning across globe for their processes to be implemented. This has given rise to the need of collaborative platform for design and automation of business processes. BPM has emerged as a critical discipline control and process enabler for ensuring consistency in planning and performance management while reducing costs across the enterprise.

The Need for BPM Tools

Business organizations have been traditionally using ERP system to achieve their business objectives. The problem with ERP systems is that they are modelled on set of processes and lack agility in transforming the business processes to match agile business needs. Any change in processes may result in customization or changes to the base system and would involve the complete Software Development Lifecycle. Further, the lead time between the requirement and the implementation is so high as to nullify the advantages from the change. The need for agility in remodelling business process, monitoring, and analyzing them for achieving business goals has made BPM an indispensable tool in current business scenario. BPM technology provides not only tools and infrastructure to define, simulate and analyze the business process models, but also the tools to implement the business processes from business users’ perspective. A recent study from Gartner found that 78% of successful BPM projects delivered an internal rate of return greater than 15%, with some returns as high as 100% or 360%.

Forrester Wave Report is an incomplete guide for choosing/judging BPM Tools

Forrester Wave Report is an incomplete guide for choosing/judging BPM Tools



Forrester has recently released the report om humancentric BPM for microsoft platform -2007.While going through the report I found that some of the major players like Skelta and Nintex has been not even mentioned in the report.

The criteria used for evaluation was also notclear for many options which they mention as "Forrester provide this information to aid its client decision."This looks ridiculus in the first place when some of the major players have not found mention at all. So in all likelihood the client will not have complete picture at their end even if Forrester advices them.

Some of the crucial things which has not even featured as evaluation feature is the capability of BPM tools as emebeddable OEM solution.A lot of services/product company keenly look for this kind of solution as it saves time and cost for them.This becomes important in enterprise implementation scenario where organizations already have different packages in place and they want an embeddable solution to tie up all these software packages to implement BPM.

The players like Skelta provide this feature and this one of their USP and it has not even found mention in Report .

In my view Forrester can serve as base guideline only and the actual choice of BPM tool should be need based and one should evaluate all the options rather than going blindly by the report

BPM & BPO processes

Companies pursue BPO partnerships as an effort to reduce costs. The top processes outsourced include data entry, tech support, and human resources functions. The common element behind these processes is that they are viewed as “non-core” (ie non-mission critical) processes. Cost takeout is the highest priority for non-core processes .The flip side to this result is that more than 40% of people who have outsourced have had situations where they had to pull a process back in house. 2/3 of the companies surveyed report “poor quality” as the main motivation for taking business processes away from an outsourcer .This matches everyone’s preconceived notions regarding outsourcing – low cost = low quality.

BPM & BPO processes
The processes being outsourced are typically document intensive processes like credit card processing, mortgage processes, invoice processing etc. The first and foremost requirement of an organization is to modelling of the processes as it is by the BPO. The second requirement is of defining a simple business rule based work flow for the process. BPO who are relying on legacy methods not following BPM principles badly fail on these two fronts. The processes are paper based not providing enough insight in to the process and the workflow is also manual with manual crosschecks. The processes cannot be run in a real time environment automatic lay to test them for clients requirements and there is no tool for agile remodelling of processes to suite client needs .On top of this there is no utility to link to workflow to generate the KPI ,Reports and audit trail for processes.BPM provides a comprehensive solution for managing BPM processes in a better way right form modelling ,defining workflow and execution to business analysis and monitoring.

Manufacturing Industry and BPM

Manufacturing industry is a business ecosystem which comprise of process for procurement of raw material ,inventory management of raw as well as finished product , quality control ,production control ,Logistics ,purchase order ,accounts payable etc. All these processes are document intensive process where the documents are coming in from third party vendors as well as generated internally. The processes rely on the document management for their efficient execution. For example if any raw material is order purchase order is generated for quantity. The procured material has to be tested for quality. The purchase order for the procured batch of material will be approve based on quality report. The different departments are dependent on each other for completion process cycle.The processes are also dependent on each other for initiation of task and executing it.For example if the material is procured and quality certified only then production will start and once the finished good are quality certified then the logistics process begin. This interdependency of processes necessitates need of a comprehensive BPM solution

Document Management system

Introduction

Most of the business organization often overlooks the biggest opportunities for cost savings which are right under their nose. It is amazing to know that recent research from IDC concluded that Fortune 500 companies as a whole lose an average of $12 Billion per year to inefficiencies caused by the lack of a structure for managing their documents and digital assets. Did you know that according to Gartner Research, the average employee spends $4,800 worth of their time annually just searching for documents?
Document Management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of paper-based, or electronic (i.e. Word, Excel, email) documents. Document Management provides a simple and efficient way to input, retrieve, manage revisions (managing multiple versions of a document), collaborate, track and retain all of the unstructured data that doesn’t already exist in your organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management(SCM), and other computer systems.

DMS & BPM
When we talk about Document Management we are talking about a complete business process. The process starts with the creation of document (electronic or paper based) ,storing the document ,indexing the document ,versioning the document ,tracking the status of approval of document ,monitoring the reports based on document etc. Now we are talking about the business process management (BPM) of documentation process.
Components of DMS
The components of DMS can be broadly divided in three parts
1. Document Capture and Storage
2. Document Work Flow
3. Business Rules for work flow
4. Analysis and Reporting on DMS

Document Capture and Storage

Batch Scanning

The format of incoming documents in an organization is difficult to control ; So it is important that document imaging systems are able to scan a mix of these documents in bulk
Permanent and Accurate Storage
Permanent and accurate storage deals with the conversion of hard-copy business documents such as invoices, statements and remittances into unalterable digital images. It is important that the images of accounting documents captured by the system are unalterable since they form a key part of the accounting records retained by the business. This means, for example, that even where document styles and layout change over the year that the original is a faithful copy. In addition, where matching with an accounting system identifies relationships between documents, for example a Purchase Order, a GRN (Goods Received Note) and Purchase Invoice it is important that the document management system retains this relationship when storing away the image so that the information is preserved and available if the accounting system is subsequently replaced. Using these relationships, a modern document imaging system should also present automatically related documents, such as an invoice and its associated purchase order and proof-of-delivery.

Intelligent Data Capture

Intelligent data capture is the cornerstone of a document management system and an area that has benefited from rapid advances in technology. This technology enables the automated capture of data from whole batches of incoming documents, such as supplier invoices, using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). It is vital that data capture technology can handle mixed batches of document types and sizes and recognises different fonts, layout and colours whilst intelligently interpreting the contents with a high degree of success by matching against valid data held within an integrated accounting system or other database. For example, using this technique, a supplier name or VAT registration number on a scanned purchase invoice could be matched with the supplier's account number held in the accounts payable module. Unmatched data should be clearly highlighted on screen so that operators can view the scanned image and correct the interpreted data where necessary so that future instances of the same document type can be scanned without delay.
Secure methods of data storage Storing digital images within a document management system provides unique advantages over manual storage of paper documents, for example, space savings, fast document retrieval and ease of backup. But data storage has to be secure from unauthorised access, inadvertent or malicious changes, i.e. apply a similar level of user permissions to the original records as the accounting system itself. In addition, the system should avoid proprietary technology so that images can be transferred to alternative hardware configurations as the organisation grows.

Document Work Flow

The documents in an organisation have workflows attached to them for example if we consider an invoice it is generated ,checked for essential information ,goes for approval ,approved ,email /sms notification send to concerned department for payment ,the approved invoice is archived. The ability for approvers to append ‘sticky notes' on the electronic document, without affecting the original image whilst enabling the accounts administrator to track the whereabouts of individual documents should be available.

Business Rules for work flow
The flow of a document in an organisation is governed by simple rules for example there may be rules for approval of invoice based on financial power of designation like up to Rs 100 approval can be done by clerk ,from 100-5000 by section officer ,from 5000 -50000 by accountant and so on. These rules if nested in the work flow are very useful in automation of whole process
Analysis and Reporting on DMSThe audit trail and reports on the documents helps to monitor the cost involved ,speed and accuracy of work. Any DMS should be able to generate the reports regarding the documentation carried out for example for invoices a report should be available giving details of number of incoming invoices ,withheld for approval ,approved ,rejected .The other important thing is that at any particular instance the end user should be able to know the status of particular document .This also helps in resource optimization as well as removing bottlenecks from system making it more efficient