IntelliChief Updates PPM Software

May 17, 2011 Alex Woodie

IntelliChief recently rolled out the biggest enhancement to its paperless process management (PPM) software since the company and the product was spun out from Quadrant Software in December. With IntelliChief version 3.2, the company has bolstered its optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, added new workflow capabilities, and improved its archive.

IntelliChief is a suite of Windows products designed to help organizations transition to using electronic documents and workflows with their business processes. The suite includes functionality for handling the input of paper or electronic documents, the output of electronic documents, and the flow of work in between.

On the input side, the software works with scanners to transform printed material (such as invoices, purchase orders, and requests) into digital data. Documents originating from fax and email can also be input into the system. On the output side, IntelliChief automates the generation of electronic documents, which may originate as spool files from IBM i-based ERP systems.

With version 3.2, IntelliChief has made enhancements to its document capture and forms processing components. Customers using IntelliChief’s OCR functionality can now automatically generate indexes from captured documents, according to validation rules setup by the customer. This helps to eliminate manual re-keying of data, the company says.

Once the form is in the system, users can begin manipulating it and building processes around the content using the IntelliChief Workflow engine, which is really the heart of IntelliChief. With version 3.2, the company says it has added a new workflow distribution stage that allows users to automatically distribute documents via email or fax, or by printing the documents.

Heavy users of IntelliChief will spend much of their time in the Workbench/Viewer. This component has received ease-of-use enhancements with version 3.2. For example, any recipients of documents from IntelliChief are automatically saved as contacts in Workbench/Viewer, which will save users from having to enter them manually. Users can also retrieve documents while they’re being processed by the workflow engine. The history listing has also been improved, the vendor says.

Old documents don’t die in the IntelliChief scheme of things–they’re sent to the document repository, which is an archive that sits on a Windows hard disk. With this release, IntelliChief has reworked its purge functions to allow users to have an active repository and an optional historical repository. The two repositories can sit on the same or different disks, the vendor says.

Most customers begin using the IntelliChief software to help automate a single aspect of their business–usually accounts payable, which is problematic and prone to human error and theft, the company says. IntelliChief made that announcement recently as it was preparing to attend the annual conference for The Association for Work Process Improvement (TAWPI), which was held in Florida last week.

Automating the AP process is easy pickings for a product like IntelliChief, the vendor says. When it’s all working correctly, invoices are automatically received, sorted, and distributed; approvals are routed to the correct inbox; and vouchers are entered automatically. When any questions arise and discrepancies are feared, searching through the documents for answers is fairly easy, the company says, thanks to the indexing and archiving functions offered by IntelliChief.

“IntelliChief users find their AP department is able to control payment of invoices, take advantage of vendor discounts, and have visibility to outstanding invoices,” Michael Rooney, IntelliChief’s vice president of sales and marketing, says in a press release.

For more information, see www.intellichief.com.