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Please note that this primer is intended as a first introduction to those not familiar to Document Management. Information contained here may at best be described as 'Introductory', though we make no claims of completeness or suitability of this information for any purpose.
A simplistic explanation of 'Document Management' is 'Making Documents available for use in a computer system by conversion (i.e., from paper for to digital image to textual data) and accessible through mechanisms for indexing, retrieval, search, and electronic storage'. Documents handled by systems may be in electronic form already, in which case the system would be required to extract, validate and store information in a database. If they are not, then they would be scanned, recognised,validated, and exported. Each Document Management Solution, while it performs the same basic tasks, can be very different from all the others. This is because the solution is designed to solve a particular business problem, and every organisation has unique needs. Document Management systems vary widely in terms of the environment (distributed, standalone), volume (ranging from small volumes scanned by desktop scanners, to hundreds of thousands of documents scanned by high-speed industrial strength scanners), the tasks they perform, flexibility, costs, deployed platforms, and so on. Document Management is a multi-billion dollar industry, serving diverse industry segments, ranging from medical, educational, to banking, financial, insurance, utility, to governments and other agencies.
Workflow management can be understood by comparing it against an industrial assembly line. In an assembly line, a finished product emerges from a series of operations on it. Similarly, a WM system is the 'assembly line' of the DM system. Workflow systems vary widely depending upon the complexity of the entire system. For example, the workflow component for a desktop DM product is vastly different from the workflow system for a large-scale high-volume distributed DM System with advanced transaction management, intelligent batch-processing, and error recovery mechanisms.
This deals with the task of making a digital representation of an actual physical document available to the DM System. This includes scanning, and image pre-processing to eliminate noise, convert images to the most efficient format, displaying images, and so on. Imaging components vary widely depending upon what they are required to do.
This deals with recognising digital document images using Character Recognition technologies and extracting information from them.
Data Validation & Quality Assurance:
There are many instances (consider a payment transaction processing) where the results of Recognition need to be validated for accuracy. In addition, results of OCR/ICR images on unclear images, poorly shaped characters, etc., need to be rectified before the results are ready for use.
Data Export / System Interfacing:
In most cases, the results of the DM system are only an input to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. In other cases, results need to be stored in a format accessible to other computer programs and users. The process of storing the results in the required manner involves one or more of conversion, indexing, writing into a database, transferring to permanent storage, and similar tasks.
Please note that this primer is intended as a first introduction to those not familiar to Document Management. Information contained here may at best be described as 'Introductory', though we make no claims of completeness or suitability of this information for any purpose.