From its headquarters in Singapore, CumulusPro has been working since 2012 on a completely new approach to document process automation, optimised for cloud delivery
Singapore, 1 July 2014 - It is clear from the first glance at their solution that the company knows the industry very well - indeed the management have over 20 years’ experience of the ECM/DM marketplace.
The CumulusPro proposition is straightforward: to simplify the way that business documents are captured, shared and processed via the Cloud. The key challenges the software hopes to address relate to remote capture, and the problems that current solutions have of needing to deploy and maintain numerous fat clients for remote/field/home users.
Asking a user in their home to scan and return a business critical document such as an application form or claim presents all kinds of troublesome issues: quality, dpi, file size and more are effectively out of the control of the company waiting to receive the scanned image. Current approaches take too long and cost too much, and that, say CumulusPro, defeats the whole point of online documents.
CumulusPro offers a complete Cloud-based process automation platform. Users can still visit a company’s portal or website, download, print and manually complete a form - it is when the CumulusPro powered system then prompts them to click ‘Scan’ that the difference becomes clear. The CumulusPro platform will configure the scan interface on the user’s behalf to suit the needs of the application, scan and connect the image to the appropriate back-end repository; the user in effect adds his own metadata to the scanned image using a simple web interface before sending.
The scan interface is kept as simple as possible: it can be configured at the back end to control the visibility of options such as colour/greyscale/b&w scanning, so that the end user isn’t being asked to make any decisions about the image quality - it is all controlled centrally by the platform. It is a simple matter for central admin staff to make changes that are instantly applied to all users of the solution worldwide, without ever needing to update any client software on user devices.
The solution is currently available in three variations, from an Office 365 app to a full business solution: ‘Scan+Share’ is the basic free tool that allows users to scan via the web direct to cloud repositories like Google Drive, EverNote and OneDrive. ‘Scan+Process Lite’ is a more business-ready capture solution that integrates with line-of-business applications, while ‘Scan+Process’ is a full cloud-based document process automation platform. The interface and user experience are consistent and remarkably straightforward and intuitive across all three product variations.
One of the company’s great strengths is in its mobile capture app; simple yet powerful enough to take away the ‘user jitters’ that can make smart-phone images unusable for business capture. It uses a ‘cross-hair’ interface to ensure the image is squarely lined up and in focus, finds corners/edges automatically, and decides for itself when the image is sharp enough to capture, eliminating the occasional hand movements and blurring that are so hard to avoid in manual capture. Perhaps more importantly, the app doesn’t just send the captured image, it can include the appropriate workflows to communicate back with the document process automation platform or any LOB application
(Product Review: CumulusPro. (2014, July). Retrieved from http://www.Document-Manager.com)