Newsmaker: Breathing new life into Xerox

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We put a set of Six Sigma methodologies together that really track, if you will, the document processes throughout an enterprise, and track where they go, certainly what the costs are--not just the costs of the hardware itself but consumables and service and manual steps, and a whole set of costs that are somewhat hidden to the normal way you look at cost management. There's no soft cost. These are all hard costs.

All in all, it's a way to come in and re-engineer the output infrastructure to provide the customer with a lot of great productivity and savings based upon the facts we get through this document assessment process.

You describe documents as "dumb." Describe your efforts to "smarten them up" and specifically the concept of self-managing documents.
Mulcahy: I think a lot of what we're trying to bring to our customers is this transition from the kind of dumb paper document to the intelligent digital document and what that means is, is the ability to use the information within documents, to be active versus passive.

The impacts are extraordinary when that document becomes smart in terms of being able to really close the gaps in the processing time to get to it to be an actual revenue contributor to an organization.

You can embed digital documents with instructions and codes, and you can tag information in documents for reuse. You can literally use the digital content in ways that don't make it just a single-purpose document, that allow, for example, documents to be routed intelligently to the next person who needs to sign off on those documents.

And you want to be able to ensure that documents can be protected from a security perspective to not be available where they shouldn't be--so to have secure access to documents as appropriate.

You're talking about hard copies?
Mulcahy: It can be hard copy, but it would have been digitally input at some point. In other words, it's embedded with, if you will, the digital capabilities. So when you scan that hard-copy document in, it has literally the capability to be then managed through the network to certain destinations. It has tagged parts of its content that might be reused in other applications, so it's a document where the information is able to be actively used in the document process. (It includes) things like glyphs, which are little embedded codes within documents.

When those documents are scanned in, those glyphs become active instructions for where that document gets transported to, what's done with the information in the document, and can even recreate the information in the document if part of the document is destroyed.

So, yes it's the ability to use what has been available in the digital world, now within the document itself, so that you can cut out lots of manual steps.

We look at things like mortgage applications that today are very manual, very paper based. What we do is we help our customers get them into digital form, tag information that gets reused at several points down the road, so people don't have to go through the experience of constantly redoing, refilling out.

It's reusing information that's already available in the process. It's being able to route it to the next person who needs to touch that mortgage application. You can reduce large percentages of time in these processes. And for a bank, that is tied to revenue; it's huge.

The impacts are extraordinary when that document becomes smart in terms of being able to really close the gaps in the processing time to get to it to be an actual revenue contributor to an organization.  

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