Oracle Image and Process Management

Ether Solutions implements Oracle Image and Process Management (IPM).

Oracle Imaging and Process Management 11g (Oracle I/PM) is an enterprise class imaging platform, bringing together a robust content and business process management infrastructure with productized, standards-based integrations with Oracle’s business applications. By providing end-to-end document imaging and automation built upon an integrated Oracle Fusion Middleware infrastructure, Oracle I/PM 11g offers organizations one system to image-enable one application after another – cutting costs and increasing operational efficiencies as they go.

Re-Thinking Imaging: From Point Solution to Platform

The mantra of business operations today is doing more with less. This reality is making organizations take another look at imaging and its proven ability to provide a high return on investment by cutting costs related to paper storage and transportation, while increasing employee productivity and operational efficiency by automating paper-based processes. From invoice and expense processing in accounting, to employee on-boarding and benefit enrollment in human resources, to contracts in the legal department and account opening in customer service, imaging has become a must-have technology that department managers are asking IT to invest in. However, when it comes to the implementation of some imaging “point” systems such as those for accounts payable, trying to do more with less can be problematic. IT often finds itself questioning the value of their imaging investment when it comes time for an upgrade to a business application environment, or when attempting to expand imaging from one application to another. The cost of upgrading the system can often match that of the initial implementation, and expansion may require costly and extensive custom work, or it may not be possible at all. These issues usually stem from inherent design limitations in imaging point solutions, such as hard coding between the imaging system and the business application environment, highly customized workflows built on proprietary technology, siloed content repositories with storage volume limitations, or even the basic fact that a system was designed to support only one business application or process.

Oracle I/PM 11g: Image-Enabling the Enterprise

Oracle I/PM 11g overcomes point system limitations by providing imaging that is built as an open enterprise platform, to facilitate flexible, broad scale deployments. With Oracle I/PM 11g, imaging operates as infrastructure supporting applications, as opposed to an application unto itself – so it can be leveraged as a shared service that extends wherever imaging is required throughout the enterprise. As an end-to-end solution, Oracle I/PM 11g is pre-integrated with Oracle’s document capture and forms recognition products as well as its business applications, to provide the most complete and best integrated document processing offering available for Oracle customers.

Image-Enabling Applications: Tight Integration for Users, Loose Integration for IT

For business users, Oracle I/PM 11g offers tight integration with application interfaces to streamline operations, by exposing imaging and workflow capabilities using familiar menus and hotkeys within application UIs. Task lists speed working through queues of documents like invoices, with an integrated image viewer to review documents, and perform secure annotations and mark-ups that are consistent of the user roles defined by the business application. Data entry is done via application screens, allowing users to leverage business rules and validations provided by the business application, while the final validated data can be pushed into Oracle I/PM 11g thus eliminating the manual indexing of documents. Forms recognition capabilities can also be used to eliminate data entry altogether, so that data is extracted upfront during the capture process and directly populated into the ERP. Oracle I/PM 11g also provides the ability to retrieve supporting documents by executing searches against index data allowing documents to be easily accessed from multiple business records. In addition, users outside the application environment can access images securely via the Web, so that they can review and approve documents like invoices that have been charged to their cost center.

For IT administrators, Oracle I/PM 11g provides loosely-coupled, service oriented architecture-based integrations with Oracle’s business applications via productized adapters. This superior method to integrating imaging with applications requires minimal hooks or hard coding into the application environment, thereby ensuring that ongoing maintenance and future system upgrades will not require high service costs or jeopardize the ability to upgrade one system without impacting the other. Oracle I/PM 11g’s application integrations are designed to be open and generic, so one application adapter can be used to image enable any module, and APIs can be used to extend the application integration framework to support third party or custom applications.

Image-Enabling Infrastructure: The Benefits of Oracle Fusion Middleware

A true enterprise-class imaging solution is made up of a number of integrated technologies – document capture, data extraction, storage, workflow, process monitoring and even records and retention management may all come into play. With Oracle I/PM 11g, you get a complete system built on Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies that can handle all aspects of document processing, on an infrastructure robust enough to support content across the enterprise. The imaging process starts with capture, and Oracle I/PM 11g is integrated with Oracle’s document capture and recognition products to ensure that documents received in paper and electronic form are scanned or imported, with as much data extracted and indexed as needed to minimize manual entry into the ERP system.

Document images are archived into Oracle Universal Content Management’s Content Server, a centralized, secure and highly scalable enterprise content management (ECM) repository that manages documents throughout their lifecycle. Oracle I/PM 11g’s imaging services run on top of the Content Server, calling up images and exposing them through user applications, and providing the necessary routing to facilitate business processes.

There are a number of advantages to having an integrated, consistent infrastructure for ECM supporting imaging: First, a repository with the scalability to store increasing amounts of content as new processes are image-enabled. Second, the ability to extend use of imaged documents through embedded document library services or to publish them to portals or websites via web content delivery services, or attach records or retention policies to imaged content. And finally, the content rationalization that can be achieved with one central system to manage all unstructured content enterprise-wide, supporting business applications, intranets, websites and so on. As a result, imaging does not operate in a vacuum, but instead plays a key role in an integrated, global ECM strategy.

The final piece of the Oracle I/PM 11g solution is its open business process management (BPM) technologies for workflow and process monitoring. Out-of-the-box, configurable solution templates provide business-driven workflows that augment, but not duplicate the native workflow functionality offered by ERP systems in areas such as invoice and expense processing. And packaged monitoring dashboards provide real-time insight into process activity at all stages, helping business managers to identify and alleviate operational bottlenecks

Oracle I/PM 11g: More Imaging & Automation, Less Cost & Complexity

With Oracle I/PM 11g, no matter what process you start by image-enabling, it’s only the beginning. As an enterprise imaging platform, you can expand services to other applications without the complexity of administering multiple imaging systems, or incurring additional licensing costs. And with the knowledge Oracle I/PM is the planned default imaging repository for Oracle Applications Unlimited and Oracle Fusion Applications, you can rest easy that you’ve made a sound long-term investment that will continue to provide ongoing high returns by image-enabling your enterprise.