Don’t Be the BPO Bottleneck: 5 Barriers to Speedy Data Capture

Business growth is a good thing, right? The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry has seen record growth over the last few years, and it’s predicted to continue its meteoric rise.

By 2028, Grand View Research is forecasting the BPO market to nearly double in size, reaching $435.89 billion.¹

But what do these global numbers mean for your BPO business? And for your customers?

A sudden influx in demand can have catastrophic effects on customer service, project lead times, data accuracy, and more. In short—it can be your business’s downfall.

And your customers? They often turn to BPOs for their speed and agility. When they need to digitize years of paper records or when their own outdated capture processes start slowing them down, they turn to you for help.

But if you’re not prepared, you become the bottleneck. What’s worked up until now won’t usher you into the next growth phase of your business.

Here’s what’s slowing down your data capture process and holding your business back from revolutionary growth.

1. 1. Distinct Processes for Specialty Scanners

You have one set of scanners for remittance slips and checks, another for A4 documents. Maybe you have one top-of-the-line scanner that can do multiple documents, but it’s always the first machine to reach capacity.

These disparate processes slow you down. In order to scan your clients’ documents, you have to identify and manually sort them by scanner—a painfully slow process.

Operating multiple scanners causes several problems of its own. Each new machine you use requires time to set up the scanning job, and each setup is different from the next.

You’ll also need to hire multiple operators to work the various machines, which will slow the job down considerably. And that’s not even taking into account having to train every new hire on multiple machines, limiting your ability to ramp up quickly for new jobs.

               2. Lengthy Document Prep

Preparing documents takes up a majority of your team’s time. Before you can even begin scanning, you need to remove items from envelopes, separate multi-page documents, and ensure pages aren’t stuck together. Plus, your team has to separate pages by document type in order to run them through the correct scanner.

With legacy scanners, there’s not much you can do to speed this process along. They simply don’t have the technology to identify and sort different document types. Properly preparing documents is necessary to ensure accurate scans, but it’s the costliest part of the process.

               3. Time-Consuming Manual Out-Sorting

Delivering the paper materials back to the client (organized per their instructions) is another drain on your labor resources. Clients often need hardcopies for legal purposes, or as a safeguard to ensure accuracy.

But what does this mean for you? More tedious manual sorting. You’re relying on manual labor once again to sort documents back into an order that your client prefers. And it’s unlikely that it’s sorted in the same manner you needed to scan the documents.

Now, you’re using manual labor to sort items for easy scanning and to sort them for easy recordkeeping. Not only does manual sorting slow you down and prevent you from taking on new work, but it also makes up 76% of your scanning costs.¹

              4. Managing Exceptions

Delivering high-quality data to your customers is a top priority, but legacy scanners don’t often have the technology to classify the data it extracts from scanned documents.

Outdated legacy scanners and software have a harder time classifying documents. From poor-quality images to an inability to extract information from unstructured documents, outdated equipment just isn’t up to the task. This leads to more exceptions and more time spent manually tagging and organizing scanned documents—and slower project lead times.

                5. Slow Scanners

Something your legacy scanners can’t out-maneuver? They’re slow.

When you’re trying to increase your output and banish your backlog, speed is everything. No matter how you streamline your processes or how many new hires you make, you’ll still hit an output ceiling.

To put it simply: Even the best legacy scanners can’t compete with the world’s fastest high-volume scanner.

Image Quality

Government clients require that scanned documents meet specific quality standards, FADGI in the United States and UTT in the European Union. Achieving these requirements with other products is either impossible or painfully slow. However, ibml scanners meet the quality demands of both FADGI and UTT, so you don’t have to compromise speed for quality.

Go From Bottleneck to Breakneck

When your clients need their documents digitized, don’t make them wait. Consolidate your disparate data capture with the fastest intelligent information capture technology. See how ibml solutions are primed to help you break ahead of the pack.

Sources:
1. “Business Process Outsourcing Market Size Report, 2021-2028,” Grandview Research