Interested in Mobile Capture? Before anything, take a look at this guide to make sure you’re doing it right.
With the increased capabilities of mobile devices and the rise of advanced capture technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR), the adoption of mobile capture solution by organizations is more and more common.
However this is not something you should jump in right away. A great mobile capture solution starts with an in-depth analysis and evaluation of you organization’s needs and goals.
1) Do you need a mobile capture solution?
You might consider implementing a mobile solution if employees’ mobility is high in your company and if remote capture does bring value to your organization.
As an example, here are some usual industries and use cases for mobile capture:
- Insurance: either for customer onboarding (paperless applications, remote signature of policy contracts, etc) or for claims (for filed adjusters who conduct location damage assessment, in order to capture insurance contracts at a customer location)
- Banking: for customer onboarding (as mentioned previously)
- Healthcare: for nurses and physicians to gather point-of-care information, remote patient diagnostic/record access, etc.
- Logistics, Utilities, Engineering: to be used by the persons in the field for delivery confirmation, pipeline inspection, and waypoint verifications, etc.
- Other use cases: receipt and travel expenses collection, mobile Mortgage brokers, etc.
2) Choose Your Capture Strategy
Different capture strategies are available and it is fundamental to select the right one for your organization. To choose a strategy, you will have to evaluate the following criteria:
- Your business objectives: what are you looking for? Reducing costs or increasing your business processes efficiency?
- The Application complexity: this is a decision you will make based on your business objectives. Looking primary for cost reduction? Then a Simple capture solution would be enough. Is increasing your business process efficiency your first and foremost goal? In that case you would need to go with a Complex capture solution (that brings onboard document management, workflows, back-end integrations and so on)
- The deployment size: This one is pretty straight-forward – either Big or Small – and is based on the number of users. If you are a growing company, check if the solutions include scale-up options.
Based on these criteria, 4 scenarios are offered to you as follow:
Select one of them according to the answer you provided to the previous 3 questions and benchmark the providers that offer the solution strategy you are looking for.
If you go go along with a Complex Solution, keep in mind that you will have to plan for important integration efforts, and get ready for significant user training efforts.
3) Ensure that the mobile capture Solution follow the best practices
Make sure that your system carefully stick to the Capture Best Practices:
- Collecting: make sure that the mobile devices you use for the capture offer a resolution of at least 250dpi (a standard that all recent smartphone normally offer). Check that the solution includes image cleaning, flattening, formatting (TIFF, JPEG, etc), compression and any other advanced options as needed that ensure image quality control.
- Conversion: make sure that the images captured are converted into structured electronic files with automated metadata extraction (intelligent optical recognition technologies, for Complex Solutions only).
- Validation (Complex Solutions): the system detects errors and mismatches with business rules implementation and by double-checking with the information that is already in the back-end system
- Delivery: the captured info is send out in a ERP systems of records and can also be part of automated workflows (applies for Complex Solutions) that make sure to deliver to the right systems and persons.
- Security: verify the security levels, the images should not stay on the mobile devices (or go on the camera roll) for instance
- Device Agnostic: verify if the system supports BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) environments if needed.
