As a Customer, do I need to look Under the Hood?

If you’re buying a toaster, I submit that most of us don’t care what’s inside as long as it toasts bread and doesn’t catch on fire. When buying flat panel TV’s, there’s so much complexity that it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the feature list, when perhaps all you care about is that you get the channels you want. However, some of us do buy based on resolution, on number of HDMI ports, on the contrast level and the speed of the refresh rate.

When it comes to the imaging technology that Snowbound provides, most of our customers want to be able to configure the product to suit their specialized needs. They’re not buying a toaster; they’re buying an imaging component or a sophisticated document viewer that will be integrated into their document repository. These customers do and should want to look under the hood. They typically understand why the product is important to them and why what we provide over other products matters.

So when a customer like that approaches Snowbound and tells us:
“I have a problem. I’d like to be able to quickly distribute key documents and information to our customers and partners. I think this would best be solved by delivering the information over the Web via a browser. I’d like a sophisticated Web client that will let my clients retrieve, view, manipulate and mark-up documents quickly, but a solution that doesn’t increase the burden on my IT staff. What do you have that does that?”

The key here is that the customer appreciates that their request isn’t simple and the solution isn’t obvious. They’ve come to us as experts to advise them on their choices. And for this scenario, truthfully we are the experts. We are one of the few companies in the world who can advise them on their choices – and provide them what they need.

If a customer has done their homework, they’ll realize that their preferences for document formats (TIFF, PNG, PDF, MS Office, etc.), for platforms (.NET, Java, UNIX) and client (thin, fat, HTML only) make their solution quite challenging. Some vendors might be able to satisfy only a few of their requirements. Others may have to put together a number of 3rd party components to get the job done. Some vendors might be able to customize, others might not have the expertise.
We enjoy working with customers that have tough requirements …and who appreciate the value they’re getting.

In our market of document and image management, Apple products don’t have the market share of PCs, but the level of innovation and clever design present in some of their products should not be ignored as they push progress forward, and generate change throughout the industry.  While mobile applications related to document manipulation are currently a small market segment, many of us can see the trend toward greater utilization of these devices in the business world. The IPad I think can hasten this trend significantly. It opens up a new world of portability and easy access to a wide variety of mission critical documents. Healthcare providers for patient record information, insurance claims adjusters for in the field claims processing or municipal utility workers gaining access to critical mechanical drawings for safe dig projects.

I think the best takeaway from the Steve Jobs blog is that current open standards of Javascript, CSS and HTML5 do all and more than Flash can do, without dependence on a proprietary system that must be installed on the client device.  Solutions developed using open standards are not only preferable, but critical to most of our customers and industry.

So what does this mean to you?

Flash is a convenient technology because so many systems already have it installed so arguments are made that a Flash based viewer is installation free.  Other benefits are that image display can be very good, scrolling through a document is very fast, and Flash viewers are free.

But what’s the bottom line?

There is no denying that Flash must be installed on the client device. It is not installation free or support free – regular updates are required. Flash is a proprietary format to which you must convert your documents in order for the viewer to work. There is cost to the back end systems that are used to convert documents and images to the Flash format.  Plus, it works poorly on Mac computers according to Jobs, and it is not available at all on mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPad.

There are better mobile document viewing solutions – true installation free, cross-platform viewers that work with open standards and no proprietary format; viewers that work on any browser and even devices such as the iPad and iPhone with a little tweaking. You’re welcome to view our demo to see for yourself:  Mobile Document Viewer

There are many reasons for the push towards Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by our current administration, among these, to reduce health care expenses via technology that utilizes electronic document imaging. While there are many that support this concept and effort, there are almost as many cautioning us that this is not a simple process and even five years is not long enough to rectify the situation

It is hoped that the adoption of EMR across the US medical industry will improve medical care by making patient information more readily available. Improved medical care can mean a variety of things; from a better understanding of a patient’s pre-existing history via diagnostic records, vaccination records, allergies, previous diseases and pre-existing conditions, to easier methods of communication with other medical professionals for treatment and follow-on care.

Insurance carriers also benefit because recording a patient’s condition and treatment record can be more easily understood via EMR in comparison to hand-written documents. Costs can also be lowered by having a secure central repository of patient records for multiple medical practitioners so that economies of scale can be achieved with regards to patient billing and insurance reimbursement submissions.

Additionally, EMR systems can also help reduce unnecessary tests and treatments because patient history will be more completely recorded and more widely available.

So what are the pitfalls? Even though the goals are laudable, implementation is going to take time due to:

1) In some cases, EMR systems are being used primarily for patient billing and insurance reimbursement because getting paid, unfortunately, can take priority over patient care. Good for healthcare insurers, but bad for patients if not also used to improve medical care.

2) There are few standards in the field so that patient records stored in one medical records system, may be accessed by another. This can even be true with scanned records since, in some cases, they are imported in a proprietary format.

3) There are so many paper records still in use that many healthcare organizations are trying to economically justify importing their patients’ records into an imaging system.

4) Individual Private practitioners, not affiliated with a large healthcare organization, may not conceivably justify the cost of migrating their patients’ records to such a system when the cost of hardware and software might be in the $40,000 range.

Possible First Steps to Successful EMR Implementation

1) Some of the companies that stand to reap the rewards of EMR implementation the fastest and have the best ability to leverage their record systems are the insurance companies and hospitals. In addition to making it easier for these firms to perform their patient billing, they can easily expand their systems to include patient medical records. Using the latest technology, such as Web-based interfaces and viewer add-ons (like our VirtualViewer AJAX), , secure medical records viewing technology can be provided at little cost, and with little or no training!

2) Medical records and insurance companies should create a set of standards to quickly establish communication protocols between systems (ideally use what exists today) and direct all medical record images to be put in a standard format like TIFF or PDF which almost any system can read today. Additional benefits to such image formats would be that by using modern annotation technology, physician notes can be placed on such records as ‘sticky notes’ or other types of annotations, and securely archived.

3) Service companies in the medical records and insurance processing industries could take it upon themselves to utilize existing industry standards for communication, document storage, and document formats (such as TIFF, PDF and Word), so that they can easily interoperate with whatever systems already exist, or come to market. Plus, by using Web-based viewers, they can reduce training and installation issues for their users.

Summary

Improving health care through EMR integration a provides many measureable benefits, both for patients, and the organizations involved in providing healthcare. Now is the time to establish some standards to insure that all players can effectively and efficiently communicate, and securely share healthcare information.. Successful EMR implementation will allow for competition and cooperation – which hopefully will result in faster and more successful results for all. Just be warned that this process will not come overnight, but then, patience is a virtue.

So the contravening factors of high importance and a revenue sink means that we are driven to create systems that are efficient, economical, accurate and reliable. Scalability is also important so that a system we devise today can still be producing for us several years into the future – as demand increases. Additionally if such systems can integrate with other corporate tasks that share a need for content management, then other savings can be found with regards to servers, communication, staff training, and economies with system development and software licensing.

Clearly, Snowbound believes we have solutions to assist the industry in our mutual need to solve these pressing requirements. (See our Virtual Viewer DETAILS). However there are many differing needs and a wide variety of combinations of products and processes that can be utilized to solve differing requirements.

We would like to offer a “Using ECM Systems for Compliance” Forum for our audience. We believe this forum can be used for members to share problems and ideas on an on-line basis, allowing them to avoid re-inventing the wheel. If you feel that such a forum would be of value to you, please respond to the email below to indicate your interest and optionally provide specific issues you’d like addressed.

Here’s to a healthy discussion
Simon

Click here: pres2010@snowbound.com

Note: All submitted information will be protected under Snowbound’s strict confidentiality guidelines unless otherwise noted.

I firmly believe that we serve our customers best by always understanding what they want and need.  So help us help you.  Let’s start off the New Year this way:  click on the email below and tell me what you need (or what you want changed) from Snowbound this year and I’ll respond with what we think we can do to fulfill your needs.

Don’t be constrained by the choices below but here’s a sample list:

• Need more extensive viewing or conversion applications solutions?

• Need special capabilities in our components or tools?

• Need better installation instructions?

• Better documentation?

• More knowledgeable or more responsive customer support?

• More programming samples?

• Need new document or format support?

• Need media format support?

• Need more products on our Java, .NET, Unix or other platforms?

• Need connectors to ECM systems, scanning systems, reporting systems, database systems?

• Need faster performance on a particular product?

Happy New Year to all

Simon

Click here:   pres2010@snowbound.com to send a direct message to me.

Note 1:  An exposed email address like this will be spammed pretty quickly so we may need to change the address regularly.  So don’t hesitate, send me your message now.

Note 2:  All submitted information will be protected under Snowbound’s strict confidentiality guidelines unless otherwise requested.

When you’ve been on the ground floor of several start-ups, you end up being intimately involved with issues that members of large organizations never even see. When you sell to designers, engineers and developers who are creative and demanding, you end up responding to extremely urgent requests, typically where the customer has short (or missed) deadlines.

Let’s look at both sides of the table.
The customer recognizes they need your product except for a few “little” things it doesn’t yet do. Additionally the customer is under a tight development deadline because they only just now realized that they’ve got an end-user driven opportunity that requires immediate response. So the customer makes demands of the vendor … even before the purchase.

The vendor sees an interesting opportunity that they hope is real. They also have other customers with their own demands. Additionally, the vendor is developing new and exciting products that have great market potential with a short window of opportunity. And, of course, because the vendor runs an efficient organization, there aren’t a lot of extra engineers sitting around idle.

In situations like that, should you select the vendor that offers unlimited free and even free lifetime support? The answer is YES, if it will work. But can it work?

If all customers are respectful, self-reliant and read the documentation, free lifetime support might be possible. With some effort and reading, a good developer or system designer can figure most things out. But what about the developer that’s under the gun by his boss and doesn’t have the time to work things out. Well, that person contacts support, demands a conference call, asks for samples and when he or she gets it, asks for it again and again. I really can’t blame them – you do what works. But can the vendor support a customer like that at no charge? Well, perhaps, if they don’t have any other customers. If they’re a startup, maybe that works for a while but for any established company, the economics don’t work that way. Either you have a few high-paying customers or many customers who pay somewhat less. But you can’t have lots of demanding customers getting free support. Somehow revenues have to come in to pay for that service. The economic truth is that premium support requires realistic maintenance and support fees or higher product pricing.

So the next time you see a vendor promising free lifetime support, look for the catch. Are the products over-priced to compensate, is the support by a user-supported volunteer forum or does the support take a lifetime to get?

In high-tech, it’s rare to have products that plug and play. Your vendor needs to be there for you, year after year.

Have a great holiday season,
Simon Wieczner

At our company, we like to encourage everyone to be green where possible. We recycle all our paper after we’ve printed on the opposite side, we use real dishes, glasses and silverware and eliminated disposable paper cups, plates and utensils, we dimmed some of our lights, and look for other ways to use the earth more gently.

However I like to think our greatest contribution is participating in the Green revolution involving the reduction of paper usage in business. In New England, many of us love our trees, particularly now in the fall foliage season, and we feel wronged when we see them cut down for paper. In our industry, we also feel frustrated when we hear that many businesses still use paper 50 to 80% of the time when electronic document handling would probably do. Our own company still uses a fair amount of paper for record filing that we eventually hope to reduce.

It is encouraging to see that many of our customers, using our technology, make a major impact on paper reduction. Our customers include all the major banks, many large insurance companies, quite a number of ECM companies, shipping companies and a wide assortment of other types. They all have at least one goal in common – to replace the use of paper in order to make business processes more efficient, faster and less expensive.

They do this by scanning documents and then processing them electronically – for reviewing them, for extracting important information, for marking them up as part of a workflow process, for safe storage and ultimately for secure destruction. The cost of paper creation, printing, handling, manual filing and shredding are all dramatically reduced while processing is speeded and security enhanced.

I doubt that many of our employees or those in the many other ECM companies pause to think about this very often, but every once in a while, it’s important to realize that what you do helps society and the environment.

Most people out there presume it will be taken care of by your friendly software application vendor. That’s not unreasonable but it’s not a safe assumption. Having been in the industry for quite a while, and having a certain level of expertise, it behooves me to watch out for my customers. We all work in niches and you end up realizing that no one can be an expert in every field. So if your expertise can help someone or at least guide them so they don’t make a major mistake, I think that’s the responsibility of being part of the community.

So why does the past matter? Well, you’ve all heard (paraphrased) “those who ignore history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past”. And since I’m in the document imaging business, I feel obligated to educate my fellow man about why the past needs tending – at least with regards to document storage.

Most of us can remember when there were a lot of players in the game of electronic document storage – e.g. word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, photos and scanned documents. We all know that many of those players are either gone or absorbed by other companies. The originators of TIFF, for example, were absorbed by Adobe. Is there anyone at Adobe who cares about TIFF any longer? There were so many word processing vendors and now we have so few. The old formats may be supported by the likes of Microsoft but their desire to pay attention to that declines year by year. Many document management companies 10-20 years ago wanted to own their customers and so they created proprietary imaging formats loosely or closely based on TIFF. But if the company is defunct, where are the specs on how to decipher that document?

One of the most ubiquitous document formats – AFP (MO:DCA) – was created by IBM. It is still used today but because it was proprietary to IBM, most products can’t support it.. Because it has aged, even IBM has limited resources to work with the old versions of this format. However because of the size of IBM’s market, there are billions of such documents out there.

We are experts in both current and legacy document formats. Based on our experience, it is important for you to do some research before you migrate to a new ECM system or augment your current ECM system.

We have a basic list of questions I thought I’d share. We use these with our customers to help them identify their pain points and narrow down the viewing solution that would best meet their needs.

• Understand which document types (and file formats) you need to support
• Determine the functionality required by in-house and external business units – input, viewing, review, conversion, enhancement, security, and/or storage
• Talk with your enterprise IT department to determine installation requirements and potential issues (i.e., how many users must be updated, are new software licenses and training required).
• Do you need a scalable system – determine how many users will need viewing capabilities now and how that user base may grow in the future.
• Will various departments/divisions have different requirements, and will you be including outside stakeholders such as agents, brokers, partners or end customers

There are a lot of providers out in the market that offer different solutions for different needs. It is critical that you understand your particular requirements before investing to ensure that the solution you pick will meet your needs now and in the future.

Below are a few vendors in the ECM and Viewing space that you may want to consider when doing your research:

ECM Vendors and Conversion Technology Vendors:
EMC – www.emc.com
IBM – www.IBM.com
Oracle/Stellent – www.Oracle.com
OpenText – www.opentext.com
Alfresco Open Source ECM – www.alfresco.com
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 – MOSS office.microsoft.com
HP Trim (formerly Tower) – www.hp.com

Document Viewer Vendors
Snowbound Software (VirtualViewer)– www.Snowbound.com
Daeja (ViewOne) www.Daeja.com
Informative Graphics (Brava) www.Infograph.com
Atalasoft (ViewOne) www.atalasoft.com

Good luck with your research. If you have any questions, we’d be happy to talk to you and help you navigate the processes of selecting a viewing vendor.

Due to the state of the economy, the certainty of projects closing on a particular date is missing for many situations, driving sales managers into anxiety. But due to the undeniable need to progress, the likelihood of projects moving to approval is high.  So though you can’t take it to the bank, I think the many industries we relate to (transportation, finance, health care, insurance and others) seem to be moving already and poised to accelerate further.

One marker that helps create that opinion is that development activity has really picked up.  How do we know? Because our support demands are up – lots of people there with many questions while busily moving forward on their projects. To my mind, that means a lot of deployments are scheduled for the fall by companies confident of the future.

So take a deep breath now, I expect September and October to be even more demanding and rewarding. More questions, more support, more urgency but also more business.

To start, you ask questions! Without an in-depth free flowing question-based discussion there is no way you can understand your customer’s problem and even less chance of providing a solution. That information allows you, as the vendor, to recommend the best choice to the customer, even if that best choice does not include your technology. With that kind of understanding, and applying the industry expertise you have, you are in a position to provide the customer what they need while watching out for the intangibles they may not understand.

One other thing we’ve found that’s critical to maintaining a healthy business relationship is understanding the customer’s expectations and presumptions, even if partially unspoken, to minimize surprises. For example, a customer wants to perform mass file conversion and asks about the accuracy of the process…but they may not ask how long the conversion will take. Industry knowledge will tell us that the conversion of 10 million color documents will take a while, and they might prefer to use our UNIX based products rather than our Java products to get that 3x-5x faster throughput. For that customer, when performance wasn’t enough for their increasing business, we swapped out the Java for UNIX. An easy switch and it solved their most critical problem.

Other situations occur when a customer doesn’t take time to understand the nuances of document display and therefore creates images for display which are faint, grainy or just plain hard to read. Then the dreaded support message comes in – “your product is producing bad images – you need to fix it now”. In the original discussion, the wise sales engineer should have made a point to ferret out whether the customer understood technical issues with regards to anti-aliasing and resolution (critical for optimal display). A little education could have avoided that support call. (Yes, it’s in the manual, but … .) So we educate the customer, offer assistance and try to add some automation to our products to reduce the risk of error.

Rushing through to the sale always worries me. If you take time to understand the customer’s needs and set proper expectations, the customer will succeed and your relationship will last. If you’re in the game for the long-term, it’s all about the success of your customers.