In case you didn’t hear, yesterday was the future. That is, according to sci-fi classic Back to the Future Part II. In the film, Doctor Brown and Marty McFly time-travel to October 21, 2015, and experience a wild future society in which the youths wear their pants inside out and people ride around on hoverboards—yet strangely everyone still gets their news from the newspaper and payphones are still a thing.
And while we might not have flying cars that we fill up at robotic gas stations yet, and they never made enough Jaws sequels to be on #19 yet (thank goodness), 2015 is a great time to be alive. The technology available to us is quite incredible when contrasted with what was available in 1989 (although life would arguably be better if we had power-lacing sneakers, self-drying jackets and down-to-the-second weather forecasts).
One area of life where we’ve truly advanced technologically is in document management. The capabilities we’ve built up to in the past 26 years would be pretty mind-blowing to an odd pair of time-travelers visiting us from 1989. So how far has document management technology come since the days of Marty and Doc?
- While we still use faxes, document management technology is aimed at converting anything faxed, printed or mailed into useful data—not using more paper. In Back to the Future Part II, not only were fax machines still prevalent, they were everywhere—attached to mailboxes in public places, even installed in people’s bathrooms. Faxes are still used in many industries today, especially those like healthcare, but the goal of document management technology is to convert incoming faxes into digital files, extract the important data, and store them digitally so they can be easily accessed.
- In BTTF2, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on convenience, in the form of things like dehydrated foods, voice-activated lights and robots that walk your dog for you. The reality is, our society’s values haven’t changed so drastically in 26 years that we’ve lost the simple joys of cooking a delicious meal from scratch or taking our pets for a walk. Where we have come a long way is in efficiency with our work lives. Today’s companies are far less interested in having employees who slave away for 14 hours a day on menial tasks and much more excited about helping their employees get their jobs done in the smartest and most efficient manner. Document management is a huge part of making that a reality. Streamlining workflow processes, reducing time spent on manual tasks and creating secure but easily accessible document storage solutions helps make workdays significantly more manageable. And it’s a good thing, too; I don’t know about you, but dehydrated pizza sounds pretty horrific to me.
- Unfortunately, we still can’t turn garbage into fuel powerful enough to power our flying cars (nor can we fly our cars. Probably the most disappointing inaccuracy from this movie). However, with advanced document capture technology, we can easily turn documents into useful data to make your life easier. And like Doc’s home energy reactor, “Mr. Fusion,” our technology can basically do all of the work for you. With automation features like the Accelerated Classification Engine and Table Extraction, PSIGEN’s document capture and data extraction tools simplify the most complex document management projects.
Want to learn more about how PSIGEN can help your business become a company of the future? Check out some of our other blog posts on business process improvement, or get connected with a sales rep here.
