Robyn Boyd on behalf of PFU (EMEA) Limited – a Fujitsu company discusses how organisational intelligence will help businesses achieve digital transformation fit for today’s digital age
Every organisation knows the importance of ensuring their business models are fit for the digital age. Yet, while there’s widespread awareness that digital transformation is critical to building competitive advantage, the barriers to achieving this are proving difficult to overcome. Transformation initiatives are not only difficult to implement quickly but can lose momentum and fall short of delivering the value that they should provide.
With hindsight, yesterday’s idea of transforming an organisation looked relatively simple — find ways of doing things more efficiently and cost-effectively. While this is still important — and costs are still a significant consideration across every part of the enterprise — digital initiatives today, mean a lot more. Digital transformation is about creating a competitive edge in increasingly crowded markets, personalising the customer experience, connecting your employees, maintaining robust global security and adapting with furious speed to any twist or turn your business needs to make. It’s a continual commitment.
Data fuels organisations and involves large numbers of people interacting with diverse systems every day to produce results. Often digital transformation concentrates on the technology and loses sight of the people and processes that need to change if the investment is to deliver on the promise. At PFU EMEA, we have adopted organisational intelligence as a way of looking at the entire business impact. From the organisational structure, culture, stakeholder relations, to data capture processes and knowledge assets in addition to the Fujitsu scanners and software solutions that we provide.
Nearly a third of businesses do not yet have a clear digital transformation plan in place. There are a several factors at play that affect organisations across the continent. The most important is the inability to go paperless. While the majority of organisations believe it is impossible to go completely paperless, half are storing records both on paper and digitally.
Of course, there are issues around security and legality determining continued paper use in some sectors. Still, in many cases, cultural issues are a vital factor, particularly for those organisations with an older demographic of employees that feel information is safer when backed up on a hard copy. It is this dual storage that is increasing the complexity within organisations and ultimately affecting business productivity and growth.
The majority of businesses from a soon to be published PFU survey, feel managing the amount of data within their organisation is a challenge. Over half see the use of digital scanning as one of the first essential steps to enable their digital transformation journey. This is where Fujitsu’s image capture and scanning leadership can make rapid adoption and roll out at scale a massive benefit.
Scanning is the foundation of embarking on digital transformation
Capturing paper-based assets and processing the digital files at lightning speed gives organisations access to insight and intelligence often lost or forgotten.
Around half of organisations make use of scanners as an enabler for digital transformation and view it as the starting point for long-term company efficiency and growth. Organisations are looking for support with this investment, as well as innovation of scanners.
Case Study
The problem
Typically, invoice scanning solutions are complicated. Between time-consuming and costly manual work, and a lack of compatible new technology, what most businesses have to put up with isn’t always the best option for their business. The result is an inefficient and hard to manage process that doesn’t work for businesses or their customers. The questions often become; how do we make work frictionless? And perhaps most importantly, how do we get access to the right solutions at the right cost?
The solution
PFU and OptoSweden developed a practical solution to this problem by automating, digitising and streamlining document flows. It’s a cloud-based electronic invoice management solution enables users to scan physical invoices in order to extract and process relevant data. This end-to-end solution allows users to perform high-quality invoice scanning directly to the system’s CrossState Cloud element, extracts, interprets and verifies all relevant information for invoice processing and integrates with their financial system or ERP of choice.
Co-creating with technology
After over 20 years of working with our partner OptoSweden we have been able to develop a sense for what makes our customers’ lives easier. The advent of the fi-7300NX and NX Manager software was critical in enabling OptoSweden to integrate it with their technology, resulting in the co-creation of their efficiency-boosting solution.
Benefits
• Easy operation scanner with touchscreen LCD screen.
• Save time and money – server-based driver for remote scanner provisioning and updates.
• Wireless connectivity – operators can scan, access & process data via smart devices.
• High image quality – for greater data accuracy and optical character recognition.
• Reduce bottlenecks – no waiting for communal multifunction devices to finish print runs.
• Streamline processes – deliver scans to the endpoint with no extra steps.
• Reliable document separation for consistent results.
• Centralised real-time job management – ideal for a multi-site or global businesses.
• Integrate with many financial or business systems.
The outcome
In practice, these benefits make setting up new paper flows easier and quicker than ever before; anyone using the scanner can scan invoices and transfer them to wherever they need to go at a click of a button – whether it’s an email address, a PDF document or secure cloud platform. This addresses the needs of businesses to get more done and faster. With the efficiency boost from CrossState ScanClientNX, the impact on customer’s productivity is remarkable. When handling invoices and customer data, accuracy is absolutely essential. The PFU solution has unmatched OCR accuracy to cut out bottlenecks and lost revenue that often comes from human errors from manual data entry. OptoSweden have paid special attention to help business get up and running with the solution too. It’s an easier way to deploy and manage the system internally to prove the benefits of digital transformation.
*Please note: This is a commercial profile