Sneak Peeks at Incoming Capture Research and a Trifecta of Expert Interviews

Welcome to our 2nd DIR Lite issue, a little later than intended, but, then again, need to focus on getting the regular issues out! Going forward, these will drop within a day of the issue.

What is this thing? As I explained last time, as a subscription-supported newsletter, we can’t give away our content. HOWEVER we can share some of it – and hopefully entice a few of you (all of you!?!?!) into becoming full subscribers.

Single issue subscriptions are available by clicking this sentence. Complete list of subscription tiers, with links to purchase, are included below. You can also contact me – Bryant Duhon, Editor-in-Chief, at [email protected], leave a note below, or connect with me here on LinkedIn.

This issue had more interviews in a single issue of anything I’ve ever created, which was simultaneously kinda cool and odd.

Regardless, enjoy and thanks for reading. As always, comments, criticisms, and witticisms are welcomed.

Let’s start with our table of contents from the August 2 issue

• Accessing the Capture Market: A Q&A With Infosource’s Petra Beck
• Toshiba Continues to Invest in the Cloud With e-BRIDGE
• Meet Infosource: Shinichiro Oda
• 3 Sneak Peeks: Here’s a Glimpse Into What You’ll Learn at Capture Conference 2022
• The Evolving Landscape of Mortgage Loan Processing: Expanding from capture to data-driven workflows is vital for success
• Modernizing Capture in the Health Insurance Market
• Capture Industry Trends (and Shaquille O’Neal: A Conversation with Epsons’s Tim Anderson

Assessing the Capture Market: A Q&A With Infosource’s Petra Beck

It’s nice to have in-house experts to talk to. As Petra, Senior Analyst, Software, and Ralph Gammon continue to finalize their research, we asked her what she thinks about the state of the Capture industry.

We’ll be sharing highlights of the research, once final, in a future issue. To acquire access to those numbers, contact Petra Beck ([email protected]) or Ralph Gammon ([email protected]).

What is one under-the-radar trend (technology and/or business-related) that is going to impact the capture industry? 

Beck: Maybe one market trend that is not very prominent yet but will impact the Capture market is the shortage of skilled knowledge workers. This has a variety of implications. Firstly, it affects about every single industry where a shortage of staff is impacting customer service and the operational processes including the management of transactional processes.

Secondly, there is an increasing shortage of IT staff, which causes delays in the implementation and updates of solutions that could bring some relief for the first challenge. This increases the demand for solutions that are modular, services-based, and more user friendly in their implementation. Some vendors are putting a strong emphasis on offering these low-code, no-code solutions, and as always, some are riding the buzzword wave, but this overall trend will have a key impact on the industry.

Toshiba Continues to Invest in the Cloud with e-BRIDGE

Toshiba recently launched e-BRIDGE Global Print, the latest piece of its cloud platform, Elevate Sky. We spoke with Kersten Woods, VP of Solutions and Outbound Marketing, and Manny Sahu, Director of Technical Marketing, about the key elements of this release, why it’s important to Toshiba, and touched on a few industry trends as well.

I wasn’t surprised, but it was interesting to hear a major MFP manufacturer strike the same themes as the document scanner folks – ease of use, make life easy for IT and the end user, be part of the solution. Underlying much of that, like most everything these days in the IT universe, the cloud.

Woods shared what she think is the most important aspect of the release. “Beyond the frictionless printing (which is their marketing phrase for the pull printing functionality),” she said, “I would point out the cloud integrations with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. What does that mean? That means that if you are a customer today and have either of those [which is the majority of the workplaces] then this solution plugs directly into your existing user base. We emphasize that because that means you can start this today. I can have you set-up in minutes for print, so frictionless printing in minutes because it pulls all your existing users.”

She pointed out that’s also helpful for security. Once an employee’s access is removed, they no longer have access to the devices.  

Meet Infosource: Shinichiro Oda

He is Infosource’s Japan Representative/Regional Manager, Asia Pacific. Prior to Infosource, Oda-san has had a varied career – managing an AI product development team, working to establish a system development methodology at Sony Global Solutions, and served as General Manager/Software Product Dept. Head at Primagest Inc.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn here or [email protected].

What do you do and what do you love about it?

I am a Japan Representative for Infosource covering the Asia Pacific region, I have been doing this job since mid-March 2021. I am mainly responsible for document scanners and am currently expanding my research into areas such as Capture Software, MFPs and LFPs.

I feel the estimation work for shipment units is similar to develop the logic used in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and demand estimation, and is interesting in that it is similar to the repetitive process of making and testing hypotheses.

3 Sneak Peeks: Here’s a Glimpse Into What You’ll Learn at Capture Conference 2022

All conferences are the same. There’s a venue. Speakers. Attendees. The speakers talk. The attendees listen. There’s some networking. A beverage or three is probably involved somewhere along the line.

In form, our conference is no different – we have some great presentations lined up, two enjoyable evenings planned, and the networking opportunities are plentiful.

We do have a key difference – a concentration of leaders in the capture industry in a friendly, collegial atmosphere. It’s both knowledge-intensive and relaxed. You’ll make connections that will help both you personally as well as your organization.  

·       Mark Swift https://youtu.be/KhV4tMu66Ds

·       Tim Anderson https://youtu.be/KDu0_S4z1wQ

·       Greg Froning https://youtu.be/r74fbYSDDA0

For those who preview to read rather than watch, the transcribed interviews, lightly edited, follow. Here are the questions I asked each of them.

The Evolving Landscape of Mortgage Loan Processing: Expanding from capture to data-driven workflows is vital for success

Meet Mark Swift who is Software Product Manager with Mortgage Cadence.

DIR: Changing gears a little bit; how intelligent is artificial intelligence and how does it work within your platform?

Swift: Right now we have two primary pieces of artificial intelligence. That's the machine learning for our model building that we use to recognize and classify documents. Then there's the auto learning that is done when an exception is handled by the user, and we learn – the system learns – from those interactions.

So those are a couple of the places. Now, how smart is it? We still need to provide even to the most sophisticated software platforms many samples to build accurate models. The reason is a lot of a lot of vendors out there will proclaim, “Oh, I only need five samples of a document to recognize that document.” That is absolutely true when you're in a bubble and you're just recognizing that one particular document.

Greg Froning – Modernizing Capture in the Health Insurance Market

Greg brings 20+ years of experience in designing, building, and implementing document capture solutions and automating the business processes around those documents and the content management systems they need to be stored in. 

DIR: It’s interesting that you said unrealistic expectations, which is a perfect lead in for the next question. We see a lot of companies claiming 100 accuracy on unstructured documents. Right now out in the real world what are you seeing when it comes to the difficulty of using recognition tools including these AI tools, to ingest a gigantic variety of documents?

Froning: Well the first thing whenever I see a hundred percent accuracy; I start asking questions. That’s very difficult to get 100 percent of anything humans are involved in. Things are going to go sideways probably. You're never going to be able to develop a solution that handles everything that a company gets in or a business area. It’s just impossible.

Another word of caution is get that definition of accuracy. What does the business think? What is their definition of accuracy versus what you're trying to deliver?

Capture Industry Trends (and Shaquille O’Neal): A Conversation with Epsons’s Tim Anderson

DIR: The capture industry obviously is, to put it mildly, experiencing a lot of change. From your perspective as a hardware company, what's the most important change happening now – technology, general trend, or both?

Anderson: You're absolutely right. There is a lot of change. If you think about our industry, there's a certain maturity to image capture that gives us some stability, but, yes, there are a lot of changes and a lot of things going on in the market right now.

From my standpoint – from the Epson standpoint – we see trends like, obviously, a lot of software companies, a lot of our partners, are looking at cloud scanning and cloud scanning applications. We see a lot of our customers removing the PC from the equation and going to PC-free scanners to kind of pull that part of the equation out.

We’re seeing a lot of continued investment in scan hardware and software solutions. So it’s a pretty exciting time to be part of the industry.

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Peeking Kitty image by Photo by Hexandcube on Unsplash