A Step Increase in Productivity via SharePoint and KnowledgeLake

To demonstrate the step change increase in productivity that is made possible through the implementation of the KnowledgeLake’s ECM imaging solution built on the SharePoint platform.  We will explain how an international company eliminated paper documents, automatically indexed documents into SharePoint and dramatically improved the ease of finding the right document.  KnowledgeLake is also one of the very few vendors that support Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud offering. By now many companies have realized the business benefits of the SharePoint platform through the four promises of Enable Collaboration, Find and Use Knowledge, Manage Business Performance and Streamline Processes.  With the implementation of third party tools such as KnowledgeLake, companies are seeing a real increase in productivity that drives real business results in efficiencies and cost savings.

Background

One of our long time customers is an organization that must handle and process a massive amount of documents (up to 500,000 new documents a year).  Until now, all of the documents were stored as paper documents in thousands of file folders.  They actually had a very good process, but it was all paper based.  Even email correspondence was printed and filed.  If someone needed a copy of a document to send to one of their partners, they would have to physically go to the file room, retrieve the document, scan a copy and send the copy to and send the copy to their partner.  This can now be done with a few clicks of the mouse without the person ever leaving their desk. The impetus for looking at an alternative approach was that the company was moving to a new location and they wanted to avoid the need for a high density filing system, plus the wanted an improved process.

The Solution

The solution involved the basic processes for managing the documents:

1. The documents are scanned and or captured electronically
2. The documents are easily indexed into SharePoint
3. Electronic documents (email attachments or Word documents) are effortlessly indexed into SharePoint without opening SharePoint
4. Documents are retrieved via a sophisticated efficient search, retrieval and viewing engine

The KnowledgeLake tools that handle the above are:

KnowledgeLake Connect

Connect for SharePoint allows a user to save a document from Microsoft Outlook or other Microsoft office products directly into SharePoint without ever opening SharePoint.

 

KnowledgeLake Capture

Capture allows for the storing of documents directly from a PC attached scanner or from a network file folder into which scanned documents are placed.  The functionality is improved through the use of Barcode separator pages.  Just like Connect, Capture allows for the entry of the proper attributes for each document and indexes the documents into SharePoint directly without having to open up SharePoint.  Other key features of Capture are:

• Batch Scanning
• OCR for either full text of just part of a document
• Barcode reading to separate documents or define content types

KnowledgeLake Capture Server

Capture Server allows for the scanning of a batch of documents and is intended for high volume scanning.  This tool integrates with multi-function scanners and provides many of the same features as Capture.  Capture Server is great for scanning batches of invoices, contracts or batches of documents that can automatically indexed into SharePoint through barcode integration. 

KnowledgeLake Imaging

A key component of KnowledgeLake is their Imaging product which provides rich search, retrieval and collaboration functionality.

  

With Imaging you can: Search and find documents or list items across the SharePoint farm

• Pre-configure and store save searches
• Perform full-text and column property searches
• View document thumbnails and SharePoint properties within the search results

The image below shows an example of the results of an Imaging search: 

 

Conclusion

Once the project is complete, the company will realize true efficiencies and cost savings by;

• Eliminating the need for the high density filing system and expense of reinforced floor structural support
• Reducing the cost of archiving and retrieving documents from offsite storage
• Reducing the unnecessary scanning and rescanning of the same document for electronic sharing.
• Allow the remote staff to access the documents, eliminating the need for them to call the office and request files to be sent
• Saving countless hours in searching for and retrieving  documents
• Reducing paper cost

Real business solution to real business problems!

Reference: http://www.abelsolutions.com.

                  KnowledgeLake.