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As a business, are you heading towards a new sea of paper in your future starting January 2021?
The 15th October post-Brexit trade talks deadline has passed, negotiations continue for whatever is going to be in place for the 1st January 2021 and so businesses are still none the wiser on what trade rules will be in place. Regardless, what is clear is that for businesses that import and/or export, there will be a significant amount of time devoted to the new customs processes – paperwork is back potentially with a vengeance!
With no deal (let us hope not) HMRC have estimated 215 million customs forms per year will be required with administration costs ranging from £15 to £56 per form with an average employee taking an hour and a quarter to complete each one. Even with some form of trade deal, UK importers and exporters are going to have to process new customs documentation.
With this new burden of administration, the efficiency of the business process around documentation is to become of paramount significance. Faster throughput leads to better task completion rates generating lower administration costs. For example, take the HMRC figure of 215 million forms with an average time of 1.25 hours and a cost of £28 to complete. If every company could shave a mere 15 minutes off each form, the saving would equate to approximately £1.2 billion. Just 5 minutes off every form is approximately £400 million a year!
Whilst many of the forms required ‘should’ be via digital submission, there will inevitably be associated physical paperwork that will need to be produced, issued and recorded either as importer and/or exporter. It is the efficiency of these processes that could produce the most significant impact on business processes and the associated costs, which is where an optimal capture platform is essential. This is where Kofax VRS Elite® comes in.
Kofax VRS Elite® is a patented image enhancement and perfection software that dramatically improves manual scanning productivity and the efficiency of document capture processes. It’s like having a quality control operator cleaning your toughest documents and revealing data so you can access accurate information when and where you need it.
Take this scenario, a customs form arrives at your office with a combination of hand written check marks and printed information. That form needs to be ingested (captured) to your document management platform, information extracted and matched to data already stored in other business application platforms and routed to the correct team member for approval / remediation based on the data obtained. This entire process will fall at the first hurdle if the initial document image quality is insufficient for the OCR / ICR to reliably capture the content, the document will have to ‘fail’ to a manual processing queue for an administrator to review and process. Not only is the business process / transaction related to this document now delayed (especially if the administrator is unavailable immediately) but there is a real cost to the time taken to manually input the data from the image or re-submit the document for scanning.
Using the UK minimum wage, for every 15 minutes manual processing time, the cost to the business processing a single form increments by £2.18. Imagine 50% of 50 forms failing due to image quality a week and each taking an average of 15 minutes to sort, that is £54.50pw. Reducing the failure rate to 5% reduces your cost in administration to £5.45pw – what sounds better to you, £2834 or £283.40 per annum?
Kofax VRS Elite® reduces the time involved in manual document preparation and enhances the quality of scanned images, dramatically improving both manual scanning productivity and the efficiency of document capture processes.
Kofax VRS Elite® is compatible with a wide range of scanners and can be installed / integrated into your existing FastScan, Kofax Capture, DocuWare or IBM DataCap platform.
For more information on how Kofax VRS Elite® could improve the reliability, quality and throughput of your scanning process, please contact PacSol today.
Toby Gilbertson, Customer Services Manager. October 2020
