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Workflow and electronic document imaging joined at the hip. Document imaging, provides the means to capture doculnents electronically and store them online. As a natural offshoot of document imaging, workflow enables document-based information to be matched with processes and driven across departments and workers. It was, and still is, the perfect marriage.
In order to gain some insights into the development of this dynamic partnership, we'll look at how workflow and document imaging have evolved over the past 10 years to become what they are today.
Production Workflow... Production Imaging
Workflow as we currently know it had its first significant deployments about 10 years ago. Driven by the twin business imperatives of reducing internal operating costs and improving worker productivity, businesses turned to newly available functional and reasonably affordable document imaging technology to automate a variety of paper-intensive, repetitive administrative tasks. This was the genesis of production workflow."
To a clerical worker, production workflow was a system that "pushed" work at them and required that some action be taken. The data sets attached to the workflow process were scanned documents. The user interface ,as typicall) some sort of data entry screen and a viewer for the document imaged information. When each worker in a workflow process completed their part, they hit a trigger on their screen and the next piece of work was presented.
Production workflow systems provided both communication logic and rules logic. The communication logic balanced workload among workers and pushed the appropriate work to them, one piece at a time. The production workflow system compared the information entered into the workflow data entry screen at each step with programmed rules. Using this comparison, the workflow system determined where to route the work next. These systems are complex to implement.
Advances in document imaging-related technologies such as OCR/ICR, forms processing, and bar code recognition have helped further automate many of these workflow applications. Today, with an increasing amount of transaction data either originating in electronic form or being easily converted into electronic form, the requirement for workers to interact with paper-based data is less common. Thus, while the decision-making rules that we traditionally associate with production workflow still exist, the logic is embedded in the transaction-processing applications. Now interaction is less between...