Generally, imaging indexing and data capture from images are the primary tasks offshored. Hard copy processing is usually not feasible.
 
 The sophistication of the process generally drives the tasks that will be performed. In general, scanning doesn't happen in India. I've heard of one company that will allow you to ship your records in an ocean-going container to India where they get scanned, but to me, that kinda defeats the purpose of imaging and adds significant risk (and time) to the process.
 
 What I have seen are processes where people in India perform the low and moderate value work -- typically, data entry from scanned forms, indexing, and basic routing. Similar processes are often in place for email messages that have been sent to general mailboxes and need to be routed to processing queues after a basic understanding of the message has been gleaned. Usually, these processes are interwoven, with the same folks working on images and email. In many applications, the data appears on a screen as a Citrix (or similar) session, wherein the data resides Stateside and the user is entering data into a computer session that is being hosted outside the country where the work is being performed. In effect, the data entry person is looking at a screen of a computer in the US and their keystrokes are being entered into the US computer, while they watch through their monitor. It is sometimes possible to take a screenshot, but it is not possible to copy and paste the data.
 This tends to limit what can be retained locally and eliminates mass transfers of data.
 
 Many companies performing this work will also severely limit what can be installed on employee computers or utilize Windows Terminal Services or SunFire boxes to further enhance security by allowing no local storage of information.
 
 Another trend is fax in to imaging, where documents that are bar-coded are faxed by the end user to a language-specific telephone number. This then routes the document to a language-specific queue, and the bar code will further route the document to the proper processing queue. This eliminates the capture cost and mail cost, reduces cycle time, and ensures that documents are routed to a queue where a person who understands the language is located. This seems to be used a lot now in Europe and Asia, where document volumes can be relatively small, there are many different languages, and centralized processing operations in country are not economically feasible.
 
 There are some challenges, particularly when routing unbarcoded documents and email. Rules have to be written for the persons doing the routing and there needs to be a default queue when the first level review can't determine the proper route. This is similar to writing rules for automated indexing programs, and there are many cases where it is possible to replace the human intervention with computer logic, particularly for email, unless the volume is particularly low. Handwriting variance is also a particular problem, but that generally is a problem no matter where the work is performed. Most organizations will operate with a "train the trainer" sort of approach, having the people who will be training offshore resources observe the process for a period of time, learning and documenting the rules through job-shadowing, then creating documentation for the offshore resources.
 
 Eastern Europe is a very hot area for this sort of work in Europe.
 
 Patrick Cunningham, CRM

----- Original Message ----
From: "Alfaro, Vladimir" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 3:28:12 PM
Subject: [RM] RM Outsource to India

Has anyone outsourced RM responsibilities 
(Data Entry, Indexing, scanning, import of docs) to an offshore
Company?

If so, would you mind sharing the challenges of knowledge transfer,
Etc?

Thanks!

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