With the combined capabilities of eFIRST Capture, eFIRST Process, eFIRST Archive and eFIRST Mobile, BancTec empowers organisations to cost-effectively capture and manage information across the enterprise. By utilising the eFIRST suite of products, information can be captured in the field via mobile devices or extracted from paper, faxes and e-mails. Business processes can be created to handle information analysis and intelligent routing. Additionally, companies can store high volumes of complex documents for future search and retrieval.

"With the latest eFIRST software releases, BancTec has significantly extended the product suite's capabilities with comprehensive support for enterprise digital mailrooms, invoice processing and mobile processes," said James Silcock, Director of Business Development at BancTec.

The eFIRST Capture component now supports automatic location and extraction of line items from complex documents, such as invoices, orders and itemized bills. When combined with enhanced line-correction capabilities, eFIRST offers the potential to dramatically reduce the manual input typically required for business applications, such as accounts payable and department billing allocations.

"We believe that the new eFIRST features are a major step forward in handling complex invoice items," commented Niels Frost Larsen, Director of Data Scanning (a subsidiary of Post Demark), who is already using the new features to handle thousands of invoices outsourced daily to Data Scanning by some of the largest corporations in Denmark. "With these new capabilities, we are already experiencing cost benefits."

Also enhanced is the correspondence interpretation capability of eFIRST Capture. This feature automatically classifies incoming documents, extracts key information and routes them directly to the appropriate business unit to handle the service request.

"The ability to automate multiple business processes in response to incoming mail items can play a key role in customer retention - especially in industries where the value of how well you serve clients is more of a differentiator than the actual services you provide," added Silcock.

BancTec has also added the ability to use compact mobile devices in a centrally coordinated business process. Mobile computing is a factor in almost every industry, including financial services, utilities, insurance, government, logistics and field service, to name a few.

Now business analysts can design formal end-to-end processes which link existing IT resources and mobile clients without breaks in the control structure or workload monitoring. Even if a mobile device goes offline, it can complete assigned tasks, caching completed data in local storage - securely encrypted in case of device theft or loss - and re-synchronizing with the process when communication coverage is restored. The mobile devices can also be disabled remotely if they are lost or stolen.

"Combining the strengths of an enterprise-class BPM system and Pocket PC applications finally makes mobile technology safe and controllable. We are already seeing tremendous interest in these capabilities from a wide variety of business application areas such as insurance claims, loan and credit card application processors," said Silcock.