CDI and Green Business Process

A couple of articles back I wrote about Capture Data Interchange or CDI (in short like CDI is like EDI but a lot closer to point of inception of a business process). To the best that I can search the web, the term CDI is not used anywhere else at this time (8/31/2008) and there are some limited references to Data Interchange within Data Capture literature in the direct sense such as EDI.



Well what is CDI and what are the potential impacts of CDI on our echo-system? These are two questions that needs to be answered.



First what is CDI conceptually?

Imagine if we could bring the business devices (scanners, digital cameras, cell phones, MFP, etc.) closer to business applications and connect them using one single but intelligent button. What do I mean by that? Best is to use an example: imagine a car dealership gets a car and can walk up to the car take a digital picture from the car, index it right there on the camera, take a picture of forms related to that car (title, insurance card, etc.) and have the GPS location, the digital pictures, the forms and all other information about the car up to the auction database for the car to be auctioned DIRECTLY FROM CAMERA. That's just one example, how taking the business application closer to business devices (or by definition, CDI) can make a difference.



Now imagine this, your customer provides you with a number (e.g., ABCD-NNN-XYZ) and says if you send them anything related to your products use this number. Where this number appears in is irrelevant. Now, customer is in control since they can filter through anything that comes to them and look for that number and start categorizing and processing the information more intelligently and have your full records cataloged properly and processed. CDI and ways to apply CDI has a lot to do with capturing the initial piece of information intelligently and start cutting out manual handling at very early cycles of the process. Once the data is better organized, categorized and automated research elements are performed then people can get involved. This will allow companies to not only reduce the one-to-one interaction madness that we are experiencing but also start putting sense around the data that comes in and goes out of the enterprise with full chain of custody as to how and what happened when!!!



The main impact of CDI is really Green Business Process Automation (GBPA). GBPA is the business processes made greener and more echo friendly. Why CDI has huge impacts on implementation of better and more echo-friendly GBPA? because it simply eliminates the most inefficient piece of the business processes, the initial process start period by automating and getting the business processes closer to the business process inception point.



Take the same car dealer ship without such integration. He or she would fill out a form (say electronically, even though all of them are more than likely are paper) take a digital camera pictures of the car. Electronically cut and paste the pictures into the form or attach them and print a copy for files, fax a copy to auction house or send using email. This is a broken process and what starts wrong becomes even worst, since from now on both sides of the process depend on multiple pieces of information (form, camera pictures, etc.) and are going to need to resort back to paper document as soon as there is a problem.



My message is CDI has great impact, far beyond the business process automation, efficiency and savings... it's Green and it can help the environment... thoughts and comments are welcomed.