Mired in Paper, Governments Seek Savings and Efficiency with SharePoint and Capture-Enabled BPM Solutions

San Mateo, CA (PRWEB) September 07, 2012

As governments struggle to balance the demands of maintaining public services in the face of shrinking tax revenues, they are taking a hard look at inefficient practices like manual data entry, complex paper trails and file systems, multiple reformatting, and hand-carried document distribution. The wastefulness of these activities, along with recurring problems like transcription errors, has been well established. A recent study found that as many as 67% of state and local governments said they spend more than one-third of their time processing paper documents.

As a new white paper titled "Sharing for the Public Good: How Governments Are Saving Dollars and Boosting Efficiency with SharePoint and Capture-Enabled BPM Solutions" shows, governments are discovering that automating businesses processes goes a long way toward reducing and eliminating this waste and improves efficiencies from back offices to public counters. Download the study here: http://go.kofax.com/LP=1838.

“Automating business processes is one of the smartest and least painful actions governments can take to save taxpayers money and deliver value,” says Attie Vandermerwe, director of Mainstay Salire, the market research firm that authored the report. “No services have to be cut to achieve these savings. Indeed, if the public sees anything, it is more up-front efficiency, faster service, and the convenience that comes from automation.”

Mainstay Salire specifically examined the benefits introducing integrated, multiplatform solutions that combine Microsoft SharePoint technology with capture-enabled BPM solutions, technologies that reduce labor-intensive processes by capturing content for automatic classification, extraction, validation and delivery into applications, protocols, and repositories. By adopting these kinds of integrated, coordinated approaches, government entities are seeing the same kinds of results that businesses have observed for years: a steep rise in efficiency and savings, a drop in manual entry errors, fewer security breaches, and lower expenditures on paper, storage, postage, and other consumables.

The paper, commissioned by Kofax, examined the specific benefits of Microsoft SharePoint with a capture-enabled BPM solution on an array of public entities, including a school district, a prosecutor’s office, a Head Start program, and a federal program for veterans. In each case, the report found that agencies achieved notable savings and benefited in pivotal ways, including making it easier to comply with regulatory requirements.

Among the benefits cited by the various agencies:

• Accelerating business processes, improving public service, and shifting resources from tedious tasks to higher-priority work
• Ensuring proper categorization of information
• Ensuring that the agency can collaborate on, search for, and leverage the value of the information
• Creating a scalable platform that is available enterprise-wide
• Managing and arranging in a variety of formats, including mobile, desktop, or PC, at an affordable cost

An official from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration observed: “The Microsoft SharePoint and Kofax solution provides us with unparalleled flexibility for projects ranging from simple scanning with no indexing, to sophisticated, multilevel indexing of typed and handwritten data, to automated classification and data extraction from documents.”

About Mainstay Salire

Mainstay Salire is a recognized leader in quantifying and communicating the value of business and technology investments. Mainstay Salire serves as an independent advisor to some of the most admired companies in the world. Visit http://www.mainstaysalire.com.

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