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Many industry luminaries attempt to predict what the future holds for technology, but few can pull it off.

There’s always a temptation to try to predict the course of future events, and the world of computing is no exception. With everything seemingly becoming bigger, better and faster year on year, there’s an insatiable appetite for predictions, and some individuals seem duty-bound to meet that demand. Today these people like to call themselves futurologists, and while this might give the practice an air of scientific respectability, in many cases it has to be said with hindsight that using a crystal ball would have been just as accurate. Intrigued? Then join us as we examine some of the prophecies that fell short of the mark.

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it’s possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”
John von Neumann, 1949

Though the second part of this statement is certainly right, the first bit is unbelievable. Von Neumann was an eminent scientist and mathematician, and developed the computer architecture we still use today. Not a person you’d expect to make such a rash statement.

The fact that he couldn’t think of any possible new applications for computers suggests a serious lack of imagination considering that, in 1949, computers hadn’t been used for much yet. In that year, you could count the number of operational computers in the world on your fingers. They had all been developed in universities and were deployed only for scientific purposes. It would be another two years before J Lyons and Company launched LEO (Lyons Electronic Office computer), the first computer designed specifically for business applications. So that’s one more potential application, for starters.

Von Neumann’s contemporaries weren’t as blinkered, though. As he was uttering these immortal words, Claude Shannon – now regarded as the father of information theory – was working on some truly ground-
breaking applications. In 1950, he took one of the first steps in the development of artificial intelligence by demonstrating an electromechanical mouse that could find its way around a maze. The same year, he published a paper detailing how computers could be used to play chess. So much for von Neumann’s prophecy!

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas J Watson, President of IBM, 1943

Computer historians dispute the validity of this quotation, but even if Watson himself didn’t utter those words, there’s plenty of evidence that computer experts expressed such a sentiment as recently as the early ’50s. And the idea wasn’t as daft as it sounds. Back in 1943, the world’s first fully electronic computer of any sort – the code-breaking Colossus at Bletchley Park – was just in the process of being commissioned. It would be another five years before the first ever computer as we now understand the word (the Manchester Baby) was built, a further eight years before the first commercial computer (the Ferranti Mark I) went on sale, and 10 years before Watson’s own company, IBM, launched its very first computer (the 701).

The first electric computer had yet to be built when Thomas J Watson predicted a market for five of them.

Of course, we all know that this prophecy turned out to be absolute rubbish, but the vast scale of the underestimation might still be an eye-opener. Forget PCs (over a billion of them) and think of microcontrollers. They outnumber the world’s population many times over, and each one is vastly more powerful than anything Thomas Watson might have envisaged.

“Computers in the future will weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, 1949

Before you dismiss this prediction as coming from an unlikely source, we should tell you that Popular Mechanics has been one of America’s leading science and technology magazines for over 100 years. And as you’d expect from such an august publication, the prediction was, for the most part, spot-on – the vast majority of today’s computers do indeed weigh in at less than 1.5 tons. Not all of them, though – not by a long way.

Jaguar, the world’s fastest supercomputer, is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and weighs in at almost 200 tons. That doesn’t even include the massive air conditioning units that are needed to get rid of the heat that’s generated by almost a quarter of a million processor cores, which consume 10 megawatts of power between them. To be fair, though, at 1.75 petaflops, Jaguar is about two thousand billion times faster than 1949’s latest and greatest.

“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”
Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

He really ought to have known better. After all, the company Ken Olsen founded was responsible for the first of two important milestones in the history of home computing. Prior to the early ’60s, a computer was one thing and one thing only – a mainframe. It would be priced in hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions, occupy a whole room and require a full-time staff to operate and maintain it.

In 1964 DEC launched the PDP-8, which is generally considered the first commercially successful minicomputer. It was the size of a refrigerator, cost $18,000 and over 50,000 were sold – more than any other computer before it. For the first time, a computer could be owned by a single department, not a huge organisation, and it could be operated by people who weren’t scientists. Computers were starting to pass from a select few to the many.

Even more surprising, though, 
is the fact that Olsen made this statement after the second of those two milestones had passed. That was in 1975, when the MIPS Altair 8800 became the first personal computer to sell more than a handful of units.

“640kB should be enough for anyone.”
Bill Gates, 1981

He later denied it, but this was allegedly Bill Gates’ take on the maximum amount of memory a computer would need. Even if he didn’t actually say it, we can be pretty sure he believed it, as it seems fairly realistic in context.

The IBM’s maximum memory capacity of 640kB was 10 times that of earlier 8-bit computers.

Previous personal computers were based on 8-bit processors, which meant they couldn’t address more than 64kB of memory. But even this would have been the stuff of dreams for most home computer users of the day. Perhaps the best-
known British home computer that year was the Sinclair ZX81, which had just 1kB of memory. To put this in context, let’s bring it up to date. If you were offered a PC today with 2.56TB of memory, wouldn’t you think it was enough for anyone – at least for a few more years?

“I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
Editor in charge of business books, Prentice Hall, 1957

The computer revolution might already have been almost 10 years old by this point, but computers were still pretty thin on the ground. With an estimated 100 of them in use in 1953 and 250 in 1955, this new technology wasn’t exactly taking the world by storm. What’s more, the phrase ‘data processing’ refers to business applications, which were lagging well behind technical computing.

Lyons, of teashop fame, launched LEO, the first ever business computer, in 1951. But by 1957, only one was in operation – and that was used by Lyons itself for valuation jobs and payroll processing. Even Big Blue was slow to make an impact on business computing. Its first offering, the IBM 702 Electronic Data Processing Machine, was only in production from 1953 to 1954. Its replacement, the 705, broke new ground by being the first commercial computer to use magnetic core memory, but the number sold isn’t on record.

What we do know, though, is that back in the ’50s, IBM was overshadowed by a company now long forgotten: Remington Rand, later known as Sperry Rand. Its earliest computer, the UNIVAC, first shipped in 1952 and was designed from the outset for business and administrative use. It did well, but success was relative back in the ’50s. By the time the UNIVAC was replaced by the UNIVAC II in 1958, a grand total of 46 devices had been sold. Given that such machines cost between $1.25 and $1.5million (around $10million today), this gloomy prophecy wasn’t too surprising. We bet he thought differently in another five years, though.

“Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.”
Dennis Gabor, 1962

Dennis Gabor wasn’t your average scientist – he was a Nobel Prize winner. That award was for his invention of holography, but he also applied his considerable talents to the theory of data communication. So he really ought to have known what he was talking about, but it turned out he didn’t – at least not on this particular subject.

This huge 1958 modern might have prompted Dennis Gabor’s assertion that such devices would never be practical.(Photo credit: Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center)

It wasn’t long before his error was exposed. Later that same year, AT&T launched the Bell 103, which was the first commercially successful modem. It was now possible to transmit data at 300 bits per second across an ordinary telephone line. In fairness to Gabor, this technology was still too slow and too expensive to be used for anything other than mainframe communication. It wasn’t until the early ’80s that the proliferation of bulletin boards heralded the era of low-cost data communication that was available to Joe Public.

Just a year after making this spectacularly inaccurate prediction, Gabor had a change of heart on the subject of forecasting the future. In his 1963 book, Inventing the Future, he wisely stated that “the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented”. This is surely a fitting place to conclude our investigation of computing’s most unreliable and inaccurate prophecies.

Registry editing is far from convenient. It’s very easy to forget which key you need to edit or the values that you’d like to change. It can be difficult for less experienced users to carry out, too, making explaining tweaks to friends a bit of a nightmare.

You can get to the heart of Windows quickly and easily with this tool.

There is a solution to all this, though, and it’s called RegDevelop. This interesting utility makes it easy to produce a custom Registry tweaking tool that features all your favourite options – and no programming experience is required. Once it’s set up, you’ll be able to apply the tweak you’re after in a couple of clicks. And if you want to share the tweak with a PC novice friend, then just send them a copy and they won’t need to delve into the depths of the Registry to optimise their system.

Unstable utility

Before you get started with RegDevelop, we need to make it clear that it’s not entirely stable. Despite its ‘1.0’ version number, this is very much an alpha release, and it’s prone to displaying error messages if you do anything even slightly unexpected. Once or twice we’ve found that our RegDevelop project has become corrupted, so we’ve had to recreate it from scratch. With this in mind, it’s a good idea to make backups. We still think the program’s worth your time, though: there’s nothing quite like it, and if you’re careful then you may not notice any bugs at all. Those that do exist stand no real chance of harming your PC. If you’re looking for perfection, then, and will get annoyed if a project you’ve been developing stops working, RegDevelop probably isn’t for you. But if you like the idea of building your own interface for Registry tweaks, and are willing to put up with some early instabilities to make that happen, it really is worth a look.

After installation, checking the terms and conditions and optionally (and probably sensibly) agreeing to create a restore point, you’ll see a very simple design interface. The ‘form’ is the white space where you can add your Registry tweaking options through five different controls: Checkbox sets numeric values, Textbox handles strings, Label provides captions, Picturebox holds images and Button runs applications (more on that later).

Checkboxes are great tools for setting binary and numeric registry values

Let’s think of some uses for the program. Suppose, for instance, that you’re tired of leaving your PC on overnight to download a huge file only to wake up in the morning and find that it’s been rebooted by Windows Update and you need to start the process again. There’s an easy Registry tweak for this, but you don’t want to leave it applied all the time, because normally you want Windows Update to install security patches as soon as they arrive. The solution to this problem? Use RegDevelop to provide a simple interface for this Registry tweak so that you can turn it on or off quickly and easily as often as required.

Create a tweaking tool

Click the Checkbox control on the left-hand menu, and a checkbox with a default caption will appear on the form. Move the mouse cursor over it, hold down the left mouse button and you’ll be able to drag it wherever you like.

Click the checkbox on the form, then look over to the right-hand side. The Settings box here lists the various properties of the checkbox; these must be changed to get the program to work as we’d like. The ‘Caption’, for instance, is the text that will be displayed to the right of the checkbox. Type Don’t allow Windows Update to automatically reboot the PC in the Caption box and press [Tab] to see the checkbox update.

The value ‘RegKeyPath1’ represents the Registry key that the checkbox will be altering, so enter HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU here. ‘ValueName1’ represents the Registry value we’ll be tweaking, so type NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers into the box.‘ValueData1’ represents the value of this Registry setting when the box is checked. Set this to 1. We could now enter more information in the Unchecked section to tell the program to set ‘NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers’ to 0 when the box isn’t checked, but that’s unnecessary in this case because by default the program will delete the value when the box is unchecked, which has the same effect. And so we’re finished – your first tweaking tool is complete!

Testing time

To make sure that this tweak works, first launch Regedit and then browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU. Next, go back to RegDevelop and click the ‘Start’ button to run the program for real. Clear the checkbox, click ‘Apply’ and then switch to Regedit and press [F5]: the ‘NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers’ setting will disappear. Check the ‘RegDevelop’ checkbox, click ‘Apply’ and press [F5] in Regedit and you’ll see that it comes back. Your RegDevelop program is altering the Registry just as you’ve asked, but without you having to remember (or even know) any of the precise details of how it works.

Your content is stored as XML, which you can edit manually if you want to avoid program crashes. But be careful.

We’ve only applied a single tweak so far, but you can use the same principle to add any other numeric Registry tweak that you like – and not just binary 1 or 0 settings, either. Take the MenuShowDelay tweak, for instance. If you hover the mouse cursor over a Start menu entry such as Recent Items, it will expand. The ‘MenuShowDelay’ key sets the delay in milliseconds before this happens. By default it’s set to 400, but you might find reducing it to, say, 100 milliseconds makes you more productive.

To give this a try, add a new checkbox to your form. Position this neatly under the first, and give it the caption Expand menus more quickly. Click the checkbox, then enter HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop into the ‘RegKeyPath1’ box. Next, enter MenuShowDelay in the ‘Value_Name1’ box, 100 as ‘ValueData1’ (the value to be used when the box is checked) and set ‘ValueType1’ to ‘dword’.Move to the Unchecked section and set ‘DeleteWithUnchecked’ to False. The Registry key, value and value types you’ve just chosen will now appear here too. Set ‘ValueData2’ to 400 (the default setting) and this will be used when the box is cleared.

Shall we find out whether this has worked? Click ‘Start’, and again watch with Regedit to confirm that the program is changing the settings you’ve specified whenever you check or clear the box and click ‘Apply’. If it’s not working, check the settings; if it’s OK, let’s share your work.

Pass it around

Click in an empty part of the RegDevelop form – away from your checkboxes so that they’re no longer highlighted – and you should see the ‘Program Settings’ box appear on the right. Click in the ‘Author’ box and enter your name. You can also enter a name for your program, and even customise it with an icon if you have one to hand.When you’re happy, click the ‘Build Now’ button and confirm your decision. While the program makes it sound like it’s going through a complicated process, it’s really just saving your settings and marking the tool as ‘Finished’. Close and restart RegDevelop to see the effect – the tool now opens with your finished form displayed, and the designer window is no longer visible.

If you’d like to share your newly created tool with someone, send them a copy of everything in your RegDevelop folder. This will include the ‘RegDevelop.exe’ file, the ‘Controls.xml’ file (which holds all of your custom settings) and the Tools folder. Or, if you want to carry it around with you so that you can use it on other machines, copy the same files to a USB flash drive. It’ll then run on any PC that has the .NET framework installed.

One unusual RegDevelop feature is that your tweaking tools can be further extended by the user. Unfortunately this does mean that a less-experienced computer user with a copy could press [F12], find themselves back in the design environment, play around and eventually break some important Registry setting. If your less computer-literate friends are especially good at trashing PCs then it might be something to bear in mind; why not add a note to the form suggesting that novices keep their fingers clear?

Going further

So far we’ve concentrated solely on checkboxes and numeric values, and that’s not by accident. You should be able to use textbox controls to edit strings or enter numbers directly, but these don’t always seem to work as you’d expect. When we tried to add a textbox after our two checkboxes, for instance, our project crashed. And while we’ve managed to get textboxes working occasionally, they don’t always seem to use the correct data type, and changing a setting will often result in an error message. By all means experiment with textboxes yourself, but be ready for problems. If you prefer a simpler life then it might be better to stick to checkboxes, at least until the program is developed further and becomes more stable.

Buttons can be used to launch commonly used programs, Windows components, or command line tools.

A better option if you’re interested in seeing exactly what RegDevelop can do might be to download a prebuilt sample application from the author’s own site. WinBubbles Lite 2009 (www.bit.ly/5os7KC), for instance, uses all the RegDevelop controls to provide tweaks for Explorer context menus, various Windows policies (you can disable Regedit and Task Manager, for instance) and the ability to change the Windows 7 log-in screen if you had the urge to do so.

WinBubbles Lite 2009 is a genuinely useful little program in its own right, and it contains a few interesting ideas that we hadn’t seen before. But for us, the real benefit of the application is as an example of how to use RegDevelop. Controls are placed inside picture boxes to separate them into logical groups, for instance; buttons are used to launch Windows components; and there are textboxes that actually work. Once you’ve finished exploring what the program has to offer, press [F12] to switch to the designer, and click any controls that look particularly interesting in order to discover the settings that make them work. Then you can steal the ideas for your own project, or simply use WinBubbles Lite 2009 as a basis for your own tool, removing any options that you don’t use and replacing them with your own favourite tweaks. Don’t worry, the author won’t mind – as long as you comply with the conditions in the included ‘RegDeveloplicenseAgreement.txt’ file then you’re free to rework any of his examples just as you like – and you can even sell them commercially if your ideas are good enough.

Change your wallpaper

Most of the best Registry tweaks relate to numeric values and the bulk of the rest use strings, but occasionally you’ll want to handle something more, like an image. If you’re looking to create a tool that will set your desktop wallpaper, for instance, then using a textbox and forcing the user to type in a full path and filename is a very bad idea. It’s much better to let them browse for an image, then display the final results, and you can do exactly that using a Picturebox. Start a new RegDevelop project, click the Picturebox control and resize it to fill the form designer. With the Picturebox control still highlighted, enter HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop in the ‘RegPath’ box and Wallpaper next to ‘ValueName’. This tells RegDevelop to read your current wallpaper image, which will be displayed in the Picturebox.

The Picturebox control makes it easy to change your wallpaper and other images whose locations are stored in the Windows Registry.

Set the ‘PictureBoxStyle’ value to’ View and Set’. Next, click ‘Start’ and the current wallpaper image will be displayed. Click on this to launch an Open dialog box, then browse to and select the image you’d like instead. Click ‘Open’ and it’ll replace your current wallpaper, though you won’t see this until the desktop is refreshed.

This isn’t the most intuitive of solutions – clicking on a picture isn’t the normal way to change it – but it’s simple enough to use once you’re used to it. Any time you need an image URL in a Registry key, this is the way to go.

Protect your RegDevelop project

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, RegDevelop isn’t entirely stable right now. Simply clicking in the wrong place at the wrong time could be enough to corrupt your project and prevent it from displaying correctly. It’s a bad idea to rely solely on RegDevelop’s single copy of your project, then, and we’d recommend you make additional backups on a regular basis. Close the program, saving any changes you’ve made, then browse to the folder where ‘RegDevelop.exe’ is saved. The ‘Controls.xml’ file there contains all your project settings, and you should create a backup copy somewhere else.

If it’s too late for that – the file is corrupted and you don’t have a backup – then you may be able to rescue your project by editing the Controls.xml file manually. Open it in Notepad and look for obvious problems. Or, if it’s just started crashing when you edit a specific control, you could try deleting that entire control from the file. That might just be enough to get the project working again.

Launch Programs

RegDevelop isn’t just about Registry tweaks. You can also use it to launch programs or Windows components that take a few clicks to locate. The Display Settings dialog is an extra click away in Windows Vista, for instance, but add the necessary command to a RegDevelop button and it’ll always be close to hand. Launch RegDevelop and click the Button control on the left-hand menu. Then click on your new button and give it the caption Display Settings.

Click the button on the form again, then click the ‘StartProcess’ box. This is the command that the button will launch when it’s clicked. Type RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL desk.cpl,,3 and press [Enter]. The ‘WindowStyle’ box allows you to choose whether the command will be launched from a hidden or a visible window. In this case it doesn’t make any difference, so you can leave it at the default ‘normal’ setting.

And that’s it! Click ‘Start’ and the Display Settings dialog should appear. You can now add other buttons to launch any other Windows components that you might find useful. Entering RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL inetcpl.cpl,,0 in the ‘StartProcess’ box will launch your Internet Options dialog, for instance. Use ncpa.cpl to open the Network Connections folder, or just Control to launch Control Panel. Check the scripting site www.dx21.com/coding/libraries/rundll32 if you need more ideas for commands.

In the competitive document industry, companies that can create and implement an effective document strategy from the beginning of a documents life cycle to the end have a distinct advantage. One key stage in the life cycle is processing the critical information off of the documents. Companies that can efficiently and cost-effectively capture information have a competitive edge over their competition.

Price, data quality and turnaround-time are critical when processing the billions of documents that are produced each year. The sheer volume of documents companies produce poses a big challenge for them and the document processing service provider who need to extract data from the documents while ensuring manageability and accuracy of information.

The traditional method of capturing data-through manual keying-is expensive, time-consuming and often prone to errors. For these reasons, corporations and document processing service providers have looked for new ways to streamline data capture in order to control costs and improve turnaround-time and efficiency. One way the industry has sought to do this is through the use of automated recognition technology. Automated recognition solutions have made it possible for companies to automatically read a variety of text styles, including machine print, handprint and cursive. Advanced systems combine the power of all three recognition capabilities to simultaneously process all types of information on structured documents with increased speed, accuracy and cost savings.

Several options are available to companies looking to automate their data capture processes. One option is to outsource the process completely and integrate a 100 percent turnkey solution, where all information on a document is recognized and verified by a document processing service provider. Another is to adopt an on-site solution, in which the company deploys the hardware and software at their own facilities. A third is to institute a hybrid solution, where a provider receives the document images over the Internet, processes them through a recognition server and sends them back to the client’s facilities for final keying and verification.

Infrastructure, Support and Resources – Important Factors in Selecting the Right Model

To determine which option would provide the best fit, companies should consider the level of infrastructure, support staff and financial resources available to host a data capture and document processing solution. The company’s current situation and needs play a role in the level of processing that can be performed in-house. Security is another important consideration. If a company is unable to distribute critical information to an outside agency or prefers to keep all data in their hands at all times for security measures, an on-site solution may be the only option.

On the flipside, some companies make a conscious decision to focus internal efforts on their core-competencies and outsource processes that are not central to their business. Across a number of vertical industries, companies have begun to outsource document processing for this very reason. As a result, they have reduced overhead and operating costs associated with manual in-house processing, while decreasing paper handling, management and storage costs.

In this case outsourcing agencies help to facilitate the preparation, capture, warehouse, retrieval and utilization of documents. They manage the workflow process, so that the company only needs to receive the data in the format they prefer to leverage for future marketing, CRM and other business initiatives.

A third option for companies who want to take advantage of data capture services and still maintain final keying and verification in-house is through the use of a software/service model. This method allows companies to send images of the fields they want recognized over the Internet for data extraction. The information is processed automatically through a recognition server, and data that is not read is returned for keying and verification. Companies that incorporate this “hybrid” model benefit from the speed, convenience and efficiency of recognition services, while limiting the number of data entry operators and keeping hardware, overhead, training and management costs minimized.

Assessing the Technology in Light of the Company

Once a decision is made about the type of solution-software, service or something in between-it is important to consider a few other factors. Companies should carefully review performance, data quality and cost before deciding which document processing option is best. Key questions to ask include:

1) Is the technology and process proven?

2) Is the quality of data as good or better than what I have today?

3) What kind of turnaround and throughput should I expect?

4) How much will it cost?

Understanding these factors, and their implications on the overall expense of document processing is critical to every organization’s bottom line.

Increased Sophistication

While no solution can achieve 100 percent accuracy, recent improvements in technology have taken recognition, of both machine print and handwriting, to levels unheard of just a few years ago. The software identifies which text is being read and applies the correct engine-OCR (Optical Character Recognition – machine print), ICR (Intelligent character recognition – hand-print) or NHR (Natural Handwriting Recognition – cursive and unconstrained hand print)-to improve the speed and accuracy of the recognition process. Providers are also moving away from character recognition and offering a more “holistic” approach that reads the entire word or phrase in addition to the individual characters in a field, incorporating “intelligence” into the software to improve recognition performance.

If at all possible, companies considering automation should ask the recognition provider to run a test sample of their own structured documents. Once the software has proven it will save time and money, an accurate estimate of the savings potential can be made.

Improving the Quality of Data

Understanding accuracy rates and performance of current data capture processes, whether manual entry or automated, is critical to gauge the effectiveness of new document processing solutions. Because of the complex system of checks and balances used throughout the process, automated recognition often results in higher accuracy levels than manual data entry.

Advanced features of recognition technology, such as the use of context, can also help to improved accuracy. Context information provides a range of probable meanings that can be applied to a field in order to compensate for the ambiguity of handwritten or printed text. This range can include numbers, dates, values, or field types. Similarly, recognition software can perform database cross-validation to enhance accuracy and read rates. Common uses include matching ZIP codes with appropriate mailing addresses or verifying the numeric amount (i.e., $108.35) and alphanumeric amount (i.e., One hundred eight and 35/100) on a check.

If companies have specific information they want to verify against, such as social security number or employee code, recognition software can incorporate a custom database with which all answers are compared against. This makes the recognition process faster and more reliable, because the vocabulary is smaller and more specific to the application.

Performance and Scalability

Beyond accuracy and data quality, it is important to evaluate the volume of documents a system or outsourcing service can process, and the expected turnaround time. Document processing service providers should be able to manage current volumes and offer scalability to grow with your business. Most agencies have a standard turnaround time, which will help eliminate backlog of claims and keep processing on track.

Understanding and modifying work processes to include data capture and document processing is essential to help organizations focus on their business and core competencies. By eliminating backlogs and time spent on details of manual processing, these organizations can eliminate many of the headaches through increased turnaround times and lower, controlled operating costs.

By considering the existing infrastructure as well as the future goals of the business, managers can determine the best solution for their organization. When reviewing specific products or service vendors, the performance, data quality, throughput and turnaround, and cost of each solution should be assessed. Quality document processing vendors are willing to go the extra mile to prove how their products and services surpass the competition and how this can lead to greater returns. These providers understand that ultimately, it should be a win-win situation for everyone.

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