Business requirements for capture systems

You must define the business requirements by collaborating with the various stakeholders. Defining the business requirement involves examining the documents that you want to process, determining which fields to capture, and deciding what to do with captured data.

Datacap applications vary in their scale and complexity, but they all seek to capture data from structured or unstructured documents, which are also known as Forms. The documents can be printed pages or electronic images, but the data on the page must be first located and then interpreted with maximum accuracy.

If you are processing various document types, you must decide whether the documents are pre-sorted or processed as a mixed batch. If they are presorted, you can simplify implementation by processing each type independently, either with a separate application or a separate workflow for each type. However, if they are processed as mixed batches, you need a more sophisticated system of page identification and document assembly.

Although the goal is to create a fully automated system, manual intervention is sometimes necessary. The business requirements must specify how to determine whether the information is accurate and what to do with problems. After you define the business requirements, you can design the application.

Define your capture requirements by completing the following tasks:
  • Identify how and where documents are acquired, such as scanning, faxes, multifunction devices, network folders, email messages, mobile devices, and imported documents.
  • Identify the types of documents that the application must process and the page types that are associated with each document type.
  • Decide which data you want to capture from each page and which data might be manually typed or obtained by using database lookups.
  • Determine which external systems, such as databases, might be used to provide index properties or validate the data that is extracted.
  • Specify the business rules that determine whether the captured data is valid.
  • Determine how to handle the following exceptions:
    • Documents that are structurally invalid
    • Missing or unrecognized pages
    • Data that does not meet the business rules
    • Characters that are not recognized with high confidence

    Although the goal is to create a fully automated system, manual intervention is required at some points. The business requirements must specify how to determine whether the information is accurate and how to handle exceptions with the data or the process.

  • Decide how you want to export the data and documents at the end of the workflow.
Before implementation, you must define the business requirements by collaborating with the various stakeholders. Initially, the collaboration task involves the following steps:
  • Examine the documents that you want to process
  • Determine which fields you must capture
  • Decide what to do with the data and document after you capture it

If you process more than one document type, you must decide whether the documents are presorted or processed as a mixed batch. If the documents are presorted, you might be able to simplify implementation by processing each type independently by using a separate application, workflow, or job for each type. However, if a batch contains more than one type of document, you need a more sophisticated system of page identification and document assembly.

At the early stage of a deployed capture system, it is common to review documents even when they pass validation. You want to ensure that the system is doing what is expected in a production environment. As time goes by and more confidence is built in the new capture system, the validation process can be reduced to review only the pages with exceptions.