It’s been awhile since I’ve written, we’ve been real busy here with our AP process go live, attending the Nexus ECM conference, and just all of the regular stuff we do.
A couple of things we have picked up on though, we really like getting a ‘bigger’ scanner because it let’s us turn our invoices on their side. Because most of the invoices have folds running horizontal (because of being stuffed into an envelope) by turning them against the grain you might say, it has really improved our document pickup. Since we tried this approach we also had to revisit our barcode sheets. A couple of lessons learned here: barcodes really like whitespace on either end (I wasn’t giving it enough and sometimes they wouldn’t read). I ended up using an 11 X 17 piece of paper so I could make the length of the sheet stick out just a little more than a regular 8 1/2 x 11. Since I was doing them over again I also have two identical barcodes one going horizontal and the other going vertical to help guarantee barcode reads. After making these changes the barcode reads are pretty much 100%.
So, picking up from the previous post. The case flows through, and hits the barcode separation, then it gets dumped to the first Queue. We named this Queue SCANNED. If something went wrong with the Barcode separation it will end up in the SCANNED HAD A PROBLEM queue. From the SCANNED queue, the receptionist checks the image, checks that the correct path was set for the route and then hits complete to send it on its way.
Here is a picture of the ‘AP Batch’. If the Receptionist wants to DELETE the batch she can set the status of the batch to DELETE. When the receptionist hits complete it goes to the Assembly which is where the Document is passed down to its Document Type route. A couple of other interesting things to note, I created a Scanned On Field name and the used the Default Value of [Current Date]
I wasn’t able to use the default value of [Scan Date] since we are scanning externally (if we had been scanning from within iLinx Capture, the value would have been filled in). Then at the document level if you create the same field as at the batch level the value will transfer to the Document ‘level’
As another aside, after an analysis of our typical documents we discovered that we had a lot of single page single sided invoices. With our barcode separator sheets we would have to put one in between each individual, or we could separate them inside of iLINX capture. Well this process was starting to get a little tedious so I decided to throw some code at it. What we ended up with is a few extra buttons on our scanner which I called burst magic X1, burst magic X2 etc… What happens is the scanner dumps the .tif to a folder where some code grabs the barcode image and then based on the desired frequency inserts it between the pages. It then passes the revised image along to the normal capture import folder and then magically the invoices are separated. Another thing we started playing with is the text optimized scanning modes provided by the scanner software, this has helped clean up some of our hard to read invoices.
Well, maybe next post I will back into some more nuts and bolts.
Happy trails.
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