Electronic Business Forms and Machine-Readable Business Forms

The Electronic and Machine-Readable Business Forms Practice in the Enterprise Information Management Solutions Division is in charge of using appropriate tools to design new electronic business forms or converting your existing paper business forms into the electronic format.

We provide enterprise grade Electronic Forms, popularly called e-forms, which internal users as well as members of the general public can fill-in and then submit by the click of a button, email, or other means to your company for processing.

The Electronic and Machine-Readable Business Forms Practice also designs and prints machine-readable paper business forms for clients who would like to request their customers to provide demographic and other data using paper but would also like such data to be automatically extracted and sent to the core business application with little or no human intervention.

The internal organizational mandate for the Electronic and Machine-Readable Business Forms Practice is to interface with all areas of the Enterprise Information Management Solutions Division so that all business form requirements, electronic forms or machine- readable paper forms, would be fulfilled. Customers may tap directly into our expertise in this area on a standalone project basis or as part of the larger ECM solutions implementation.

Benefits of using our technology

Our form based solutions help organizations to perform data capture processes intelligently and efficiently since they could also deploy electronic forms in HTML, PDF, and SWF format over the Internet.

We do not use the electronic form always to capture and send data into business applications. We can also use electronic forms to pull form data from central repositories of core business applications and have this sent to stakeholders for validation so that accurate data may be received and used for updating the data we have on such stakeholders.

For example, we can support a company to use electronic form that we have designed in the PDF format and then deployed in the Laserfiche ECM Workflow module to pull data from the company’s HR application. The Laserfiche Workflow system will then email directly to each employee for confirmation and resubmission the data on the populated PDF form. Required fields for confirmation may include beneficiary and dependent data, benefit plan enrolment changes, home and mailing address, emergency contact details, and so forth. After the employees have reviewed the data and made any necessary changes, they will submit the form into the Laserfiche workflow system just by clicking the “Submit” button that we have placed on the form. The updated data that the employee has provided will be used to update the HR application data. Forms that contain missing required pieces of data would be deleted from the ECM repository and returned to the employee for re-submission. This is just one of the infinite number of ways that we can use electronic forms to completely eliminate the use of paper for several business processes. This is even more possible since our eForms can be integrated with photograph, graphical signature, and thumbprint.

Often additional software is not required when we post our forms online for users to fill in online, or download and fill offline and then submit.

Our e-Form solution is a complete business solution that is meant to support business processes throughout the enterprise. Our Electronic Form (e-Form) solution can be used to capture customer information which may then be submitted in a structured way for processing. The actual data capture can be done independent of the core business application. This makes it possible to use different platforms for the capture of the data which could then be transmitted to the processing application.

e-Forms have many uses to Business

Our e-Form supports Text, Edit, Digital Signature, Electronic Signature, 1D and 2D Barcode, Date, Drop List, Check Box, Mask, Currency and Logo objects. To enhance user experience Validation, Calculation and other types of logic as well as Dynamic Barcodes, multiple Digital Signatures, Hyperlink and Dynamic Tables can be added to the form. These run-time features including data validation, calculations, make it possible to receive resulting data that are of high integrity.

Our e-forms could also use the Adobe Reader software and PDF and XML standards to capture information from customers and integrate that information with existing data infrastructure. Additionally, the images from our e-Forms will integrate with a number of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems such as Laserfiche or Sharepoint for the purposes of automated indexing and storage. With our eForms, there is no need to manually index documents in the Laserfiche ECM. When the e-Form data are extracted and are then submitted to the ECM, it also gets indexed automatically.

Our electronic form solution integrates seamlessly with your core business solution. Where the table loading sequence for your core business application is properly documented and open standards apply, we can create for you an interface program that can feed the data from our e-Forms directly into your core business application. We can also support the electronic forms can be easily ported into the core business application.

The core business application may be any of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (HR, Financials, Manufacturing, etc), banking software, insurance software, pension administration software, student administration software, voter registration application, immigration application, or any number of business applications that are used on daily basis to support transactions in your company. In order to reduce the cost of e-forms implementation, and also to improve quality and ease of use, we use common architecture, structured classification of forms, and standardized design. We also centralize the creation and storage of the eForms. Our design, organization, and implementation approach, offers enterprise-wide e-form solution using a shared infrastructure and a standard forms application.

A copy of the electronic form that is filled in is also stored in a document management system or enterprise content management system after it has been processed and so this can be searched for and even printed at any time when needed.

The second biggest cost of an Electronic Forms implementation is in the migration of existing library of forms and user data. We shall implement a quick, easy and cost-effective migration path for your company. We have tools designed to convert both forms and data files. Where redesign of your existing forms is not necessary, we can convert these legacy paper forms into electronic format so that your users have online the same form they are used to. Other than being able to handle lossless conversion from OmniForm, dynamic ODF files, we can also handle reverse conversion that is to export e-Form such as Cerenade forms to dynamic, open, standard HTML forms or to proprietary PDF files.

Forms submitted online can be routed into specific folders in the Laserfiche ECM system based on document type and targeted business process. This is all seamless to the user. For example, a specific service application that is filled in on the web can be routed to the specific service Laserfiche installation or to the Laserfiche installation in your company’s Data Center from where the document would automatically route to the appropriate desks and offices for processing until feedback would be generated to the applicant.

04044 on 8/27/04. U.S. Department of State IT CCB acknowledges that Cerenade Enterprise Server meets the Certification and Accreditation (C&A) consistent with the provisions of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130 and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publications 800-37.