According to statistics compiled by the Association for Information and Image Management, forms are the dominant way of doing business: over 80% of all business documents are forms, and an average of more than $60 billion is spent printing paper forms annually, with more than $360 billion spent processing forms annually.

Surprisingly, many businesses still rely on an antiquated method of harvesting information from forms: manual processing. But with increased competition and the demand for instant information, the business that manually processes forms now faces a critical choice: automation or obsolescence.

And there is no better solution for automation than Captiva'sFormWare, a universal forms processing platform that automatically identifies and processes both paper and electronic forms, regardless of their design or point of origin.

Since 1989, Captiva’s award-winning products have been used to extract and perfect information from forms and documents. Most recently, FormWare won Transform Magazine’s 2003 Readers’ Choice Awards for forms processing.

FormWare is currently used to process millions of forms and documents every day. Whether you are processing insurance claims, invoices, credit applications, or customer orders, and whether they are paper, electronic or faxes, FormWare will speed overall processing times, reduce overhead costs and improve data accuracy.

Speed Processing: By reducing time-consuming data entry, FormWare speeds the processing of business-critical information, allowing you to capture information faster.

Reduce Costs: FormWare allows you to obtain increased throughput from your existing data entry staff, or to reassign personnel to more productive areas.

Improve Accuracy: Every manual keystroke is a potential error. By reducing keystrokes, FormWare minimizes errors, and by incorporating and consistently applying your proven business rules, it ensures the accuracy and validity of all information captured.

A Modular Solution to Capture Data from Any Source and Any Format

Regardless of the source-paper, faxes, scanned images, call centers, XML or electronic data streams-FormWare can extract, perfect and export information to database, workflow, document and content management systems. And by enabling you to apply the exact same business rules to all data, regardless of its content or point of origin, FormWare streamlines the process, increasing productivity and ease-of-administration.

FormWare is a modular solution comprising various building blocks, or modules, that collectively execute a process. The following are brief descriptions of the major steps and modules in typical forms processing workflows.

CAPTURE
This is the “front door” to your solution. The ISIS-enabled Scan & Import module supports every feature and function of nearly 300 scanner models. ISIS is the industry-standard scanner interface from Captiva’s Pixel Translations division. This module also allows you to import images and electronic data streams from other sources, including unattended scanners, fax servers and the Web. Single forms or batches can be scanned, flexible naming conventions can be applied and screen displays may be customized to provide a simple interface for scanner operators. The Rescan module allows you to easily rescan single forms that have been rejected at a later stage in the process without disrupting the overall workflow.

CLEANUP/CLASSIFY
To ensure the best results, scanned and imported images must be cleaned up and classified, which ensures that they are readable and can be properly and automatically sorted.

Image Pre-Processing analyzes and enhances image quality. It can include one or more of the following steps: deskewing, deshading and despeckling; removing lines, borders, edge noise or entire form backgrounds; and locating relevant fields with registration technologies. This module improves the quality of incoming data and adds a level of flexibility to your overall solution that enables it to process your existing forms, thereby avoiding form redesign costs.

Image Quality Control provides both unattended image quality checks and operator-attended visual inspection capabilities to ensure that optimal images are always captured. Inferior images are detected and routed back to Rescan.

The Image Quality Control module ensures optimal images.

Form Identification allows you to avoid manual sorting prior to scanning batches of mixed forms and documents. Several methods of identification can be used, including automated feature or image-based identification technologies and neural network-based dynamic identification capabilities.