Connecting Back-Office to Front-Office

Yes, we all have heard this before... and yes we all know how it has been doing, NOT!!! The main issue is that the back-office is designed to do batches and batches are big huge boxes in the basement with a lot of business rules around them with customer willing to pay per batch to process them .... and front-office is designed to do transactions that are short, quick, easy to do and most importantly be done with!!! Two different animals... making them work together is kind of like pushing square peg into a round hole.

Well let's talk about front office operations first. It's all about the user and it's all about ease of use. Single touch, single click, keep my indexing to a minimum, don't make me and my users think. No wonder that MFP and Copiers are at the forefront of front-office distributed capture. As far back as I remember (and that is a very long time btw), the copier machines were the masters of getting a complicated system of copying down to a single green button that all of us use and understand everyday. WOW!!!... can front-office capture be as simple? Imagine that!! Single click and you have your documents go into applications in the way you want to have them... or even better, single click and have your documents read, processed, secured, delivered across the world into your customers, suppliers and vendors applications. Now, I think I have your attentions don't I ?

That's what exactly is going on in front-office capture applications or as I would call it front-office Electronic Capture Interchange or ECI. Yes, just like EDI, now ECI can leap us forward into the next generation of automated processes. ECI, is really far deeper than the current Capture Applications, it refocuses energy on "interchange" after "capture" is done. This idea take a totally different view of the capture world. In the ECI point of view Capture has to be open, it has to be available to all devices, desktops, applications, and other forms of input devices. There has to be an "Interchange" platform that allows on-boarded bits to be processed and inter exchanged between applications. Now combine that platform with an open SDK and you got something that can handle front-office transactions. Combining multiple data streams (another name for on-boarded bits) and creating a true transactional process that can end into business applications across the enterprise.

Huge idea with enormous reach and depth, ECI is the key to next generation of capture technologies and there are only a few companies and have realized this and harvesting it.

If you see the same thing, post your comments here. More on this on later posts.