ImageSource
Driving Transformation for the New Age Enterprise

Daily, businesses need to tackle a myriad of process problems such as missed deadlines, inadequate information to make vital business decisions, unnecessary expenditures, lost documents, and duplication of efforts, among others. Most companies end up determining that they need a strategic enterprise content management (ECM) solution after they have identified such overarching business challenges. For many of these enterprises looking for an answer, ImageSource--a privately held corporation headquartered in Olympia, WA.-- is a recognized leader in consulting strategic analysis, and rapid application deployment of ECM solutions. The company’s expert teams utilize a broad portfolio to integrate world-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tools into legacy systems and provide business process automation for organizations ranging from Government to Fortune 500.

The Journey to the Much Acclaimed Solution

Initially, ImageSource signed with other companies to customize the clients’ content platform, “Be it FileNet or OTG, ImageSource built a platform and filled the void by integrating with major legacy backend systems,” says Terry Sutherland, CEO of ImageSource. While demand for content management started increasing, the industrial scenario changed. After years of providing integration services, ImageSource developed its line of enterprise content management (ECM) tools, based on principles of speed, ease of use, and flexibility. In 2010, ImageSource launched its own ECM software suite ‘ILINX’ that incorporates products such as Capture, Advanced Capture, eForms, and Content Store to achieve a seamless workflow and user experience. ImageSource has crafted browser-based and straightforward tools that overcome any given challenge, enhancing customer satisfaction, and helping in application deployment of ECM solutions.

The ILINX product suite enables the capture and management of business content, from paper documents to email and digital assets. The highly scalable ILINX platform integrates with line-of-business systems to automate information processes across an organization. ILINX takes information out of traditional constraints, enabling capture, process, and access anywhere, anytime on a vast host of devices. The ILINX architecture is optimized to run on the cloud, allows for a variety of delivery options, including on-premise, cloud, and mobile solutions.

"We are employee and deliverable-centric, providing meaningful solutions to meet customer expectations"

The Magic Words: Faster, Simpler, and Smarter

ILINX Capture enables customer partners to quickly and easily capture information utilizing desktop, MFD, or mobile devices and has the power to accommodate production scanning operations without page-count licensing. This flexible application automates capture from both paper and electronic sources and converts it to images in a variety of digital formats, useful data, or both. Using a powerful, easy-to-configure workflow engine, ILINX Capture delivers critical information to the systems that manage business processes.

ILINX Advanced Capture enables ILINX Capture to transform streams of documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready content. This scalable solution aids customers by replacing expensive and time-consuming manual operations with automated document classification, page separation, data extraction, and validation.

ILINX Advanced Capture can be configured to accurately process multiple document types coming into any business process in seconds and securely delivers data and documents to workflows, business systems, repositories, and databases.

ILINX Capture enables customer partners to quickly and easily capture information utilizing desktop, MFD, or mobile devices and has the power to accommodate production scanning operations without page-count licensing

ILINX eForms empowers customers, employees, or visiting users to submit data 24/7 on interactive forms via websites, portals, mobile devices, and line of business systems for rapid, intelligent information processing. It is integrated with the powerful ILINX Capture Workflow engine, where it orchestrates routing, tracking, approvals, and exception handling across an enterprise. ILINX eForms features easy drag and drop form design and logic definition, intuitive HTML5 form-filling user experiences, centralized form, and workflow management.

The robust and lean web-based architecture of ILINX Content Store provides users a secure repository, scalable and affordable capture, search, and storage for all document types and digital assets. Users can access the ILINX Content Store on a desktop or mobile device delivered through a browser, while administrators can maintain and control user security and access in seconds from a central location. This robust application deploys in a fraction of the time it takes to set up a traditional ECM system.

Built to be Flexible, Secure, and Easy to Maintain

ILINX technologies enable organizations to achieve ROI as quickly as possible without operational downtime and equip them to stay in the black using automation efficiencies. In a time when demands are growing, and budgets are not, ILINX technologies aid in accomplishing more without increasing the current labor force. The new paperless environment will help to achieve productivity gains through process automation, immediate access to content, improved accuracy, real-time visibility, self-service, and transitioning workers to more critical tasks.

ILINX is friendly to deploy, manage, and administrate. After the initial implementation, many customers use internal resources to expand ILINX from a departmental solution to an enterprise-wide platform. The ILINX platform serves a variety of industries: government, finance, courts, and higher education and improves business process automation for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as Fortune 500 companies.

In terms of government customer partners and courts, the company helps integrate case management systems with eforms, capture and storage. The newest component of the ILINX platform, Records Director, assures state and local governments can comply with public records requests in a timely manner, reducing liability and litigation. The firm is also involved with market leaders in banking and financial sectors, namely SunTrust and US Bank, helping them through their mission critical mortgage processing. Moreover, the team is enabling formerly cost-prohibitive applications in the accounts payable (AP) arena, integrating JD Edwards, Oracle Financials’, PeopleSoft, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics with the powerful ILINX workflow engine and content repository.

The mobile-friendly product stack of ILINX does not require any deployment; instead, customers can log in directly via their web browser. “Devoid of any page-counts, our licensing is a key differentiator” adds Sutherland. Additionally, ImageSource has a mobile software development kit (SDK), deployable both in Android and iOS to allow customer to enable content capture capabilities in their own mobile application. Any format, paper data, an image from an iPhone, or a website can be captured and empowered to drive a workflow from a customer partners website, intranet or portal. Following a methodology of keep-it-simple, ImageSource offers computer-based training (CBT) on the ILINX platform and it is cost-free.

Pure Experience and Expertise

Automating and securing document processes has ROI in both immediate hard costs and in long term efficiency gains. The Assessor-Treasurer at Pierce County, Washington, is responsible for collecting property taxes for the County. The County recognized their manual processes wasted value able employee time, and did not support their objectives to bill and collect taxes and on time. They identified the goal to reduce the amount of paper that was being processed and stored within the office. The office wanted to handle paper documents only once and regain as much physical office space as they could. Secondly, they wanted to improve the flow of information throughout the office through automated workflows. This would result in faster system processing, elimination of employees passing paper back and forth, and the ability to fulfill records request from the public quickly and accurately.
Partnering with ImageSource, the Pierce County was confident that the ILINX Platform would solve the designated business problems and at the same time, improve service to constituents. ImageSource integrated disparate systems to connect multiple business processes with the ILINX Platform. To maximize the functionality of the system, ILINX Export effectively connects the various software platforms. Also, ImageSource developed two custom, automated workflows for Oracle. The new document management system reduces paper handling, and manual routing reduces errors and speeds processing for the multitude of required documents and forms the County deals with. Through the success of the implementation, the County has been able to eliminate a significant amount of physical storage space (and the associated cost). Close to 1.2 million pages of content—more than 30 filing cabinets—were removed and 250 square feet of office space repurposed.

Going Strong

ImageSource has invested heavily in its upcoming ILINX Release 9.0. With multitenancy, it can track storage capacity of users. Also, the team at ImageSource is involved in making the features of eForms more robust. Additionally, Sutherland has continued to expand the capabilities and ease of use by creating a browser agnostic HTML 5 client, which can be browsed at any time, any-where, and in any device. Smart Learning, which leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning, is also being introduced in the Advanced Capture module. Smart Learning will continually reduce the time it takes to setup advanced capture solutions and provides faster and more accurate results, ultimately improving invoice processing. Importantly, ImageSource is helping to initiate business processes with acquisition and collection of essential data within organizations, opening a way for the customer partners to make informed decisions in new methods, services, adjustments, and customer-engagement.

Moreover, ImageSource promises to continue serving its clients with new technology offerings as the market continues to expand rapidly. ImageSource considers its employees as their most significant asset as they have been diligently serving the customers for more than ten years. “We are employee and deliverable-centric, providing meaningful solutions to meet customer expectations,” concludes Sutherland.