Paper is an integral part of all businesses.
It is used to communicate and record business
transactions. Go into any business office and you
will see physical paper documents sitting on most
desktops. Take for example, a customer who wants
to apply for a housing loan...
The customer
walks into a bank wanting apply for a housing
loan. The first thing he is asked to do is to
fill in an application form. After the form is
filled in, the customer is asked to provide
supporting documents to substantiate the details
he has put into the application form. The
application form and the supporting documents are
filed into a folder and passed to the back office
for processing. After the case has been processed,
the case is closed and folder is permanently filed
into a warehouse or storage. The file is typically
destroyed after a certain number of years depending
on the terms set out by the overseeing regulatory
body.
If a proper study of the
above-described process is done, one can discern a
few issues. What if a few officers wish to look at
the folder at the same time? What if some
individual pages within the folder are lost? What
if the customer calls in and the answering officer
wishes to have a quick look at the customer’s
folder?
To take it one step further, what
if the folder needs to be retrieved after it has
been processed and permanently stored? This
retrieval process is typically a tedious problem.
Somebody would have to physically sieve through
the mountain of documents to retrieve the specific
folder. Or to make matters worse, the folder may
even have been moved off-site to a cheaper
location. After the folder has been successfully
retrieved., it will then have to be re-filed after
the interested party has finished working with
it. | |
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A
Solution
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Depending on the business need, the customer’s
documents can be scanned either at the beginning
of the process or at the end of the process - just
before the folder is filed. Once the documents are
scanned, any officer can retrieve the electronic
copy for viewing or modification at any time.
However, this strategy introduces a few new
problems. Where do you store the images? How do
you secure the location of these images? How do
you retrieve these images? How do you control the
modification of these images?
Take for
example, a situation whereby different business
owners of different documents scan the documents
individually and the scanned images are stored on
individual PCs. In order to share these documents,
access to the hard drives of the PCs will have to
be shared and the officer who wants to view the
images would have to know the name of the
electronic file. Read and Write access will also
have to be manually set at the PC operating system
level. This is an administrative nightmare. |
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The
Ilixis Imaging Solution ...
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Ilixis Imaging is a solution that has been
designed to take on the problems described. It is
a TCP/IP-based three-tiered client/server solution
that utilizes standard desktops components to
deliver the most cost-effective solution with the
small to medium sized businesses in
mind.
The Ilixis process
is as follows:
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1. Scanning is done on individual PCs.
2. Users will index the scanned images.
3. The users can archive the images to the
Image Server “on the spot” or save the
indexed
images to a batch for Batch
Archival at the end
of day.
4. Once the images are sent to the Archive
Server, any user who has access rights
can
retrieve the images.
5. Retrieval is done via the input of specific
search criteria.
6. Users may modify the images as
restricted by
their rights.
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The benefits of the solution
include:
1. The images are stored in a central
secure location
2. The users do not require knowing the
image file name at the file system
level
3. Security rights are controlled
centrally.
Learn how Ilixis Imaging
works. |
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