Imaging & Workflow Automation

The emphasis on corporate cost containment and productivity enhancement during the past decade has prompted accounts payable professionals to seek new ways to automate traditionally paper-based, labor intensive processes. The need to document and secure the intrinsic risks associated with the payment process within the protocols set forth by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) has provided additional impetus, especially where senior management has been involved. PayStream's 2005 Financial Automation Survey (FAS) revealed that the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has increased interest in new financial automation technology at more than 60 percent of respondents' organizations.

Our latest research also indicates that businesses are turning to Imaging and Workflow Automation (IWA) solutions that streamline the invoice receipt-to-pay cycle to meet these new requirements for efficiency and control. Consider the results of our 2005 FAS of Fortune 1000 finance, treasury, and accounting professionals:

• 47.9 percent of respondents currently using imaging and document management in their organization, whereas 9.4 percent and 31.3 percent of organizations respectively are in the deployment and planning stages.
• Approval workflow exhibited similar results with 29.2 percent of respondents using approval workflow to streamline their processes with another 48.3 percent either deploying or planning to implement a workflow solution.

This report is written for the 25 to 30 percent of survey respondents who are actively exploring IWA solutions. Beginning with an introduction to IWA, it describes the most common forms that solutions take and highlights the benefits that they deliver. It concludes with an in-depth profile of one of the top vendors in this space—EMC Corporation Software—describing in detail EMC's Documentum and ApplicationXtender platforms and EMC's approach to IWA.