The Challenge Handling a lot of paper documents

The Challenge Handling a lot of paper documents

Handling a lot of paper documents is becoming increasingly challenging in a company. There are two typical scenarios. A lot of documents are received, created and printed in an office. These papers are typically stored in a document folder in a filing cabinet while work continues. When the task has been completed or after a certain period of time, the documents are then stored in a paper archive in the basement for the required retention period. The archive needs a large room, handling and administration is expensive and finding a document when requested can prove to be very difficult. Paper archives are usually not protected against disasters and paper also grows old, becoming illegible, which is a problem with regard to long retention periods. Hundreds if not thousands of letters are received daily in a company s mailroom. The letters sometimes have to be opened if no name is specified, assigned and forwarded to a recipient and distributed within the company. The documents must also be given a date of receipt stamp either in the mailroom or in the department. The departments sometimes copy letters or forward them directly to other departments. When they have been processed, the documents are then stored in a (paper) archive. 2

The disadvantage of such a procedure is the high amount of personnel effort involved, the duplication of work and documents and a very slow throughput speed or high processing time. Documents are not simultaneously available to all those involved until they have been copied in a time-consuming manner. A typical example would be a submitted building application which must be verified and approved by various authorities. Long processing times are the result. To obtain an end-to-end process chain that can process documents it is necessary to convert a paper document into an electronic document as early as possible. It is usual for such a conversion to already take place when the mail or the document is received. The received documents are converted into a processing-proof format, which permits both the integration of signatures and subsequent preservation in a long-term archive without any repeat format conversion. The PDF/A format is ideal for this purpose. The scanned documents are subjected to a random visual inspection prior to any further processing. If the electronic copies match the originals in the random checks, the electronic documents are electronically signed in a qualified manner. Usage of electronic documents in business processes is a common standard to raise process quality and lower response times. Archiving documents in digital formats offers many benefits in comparison to paper-bound archives. Storage is Paper Archive Digital Archive Fujitsu Compliant Archiving SecDocs very cost-efficient, and digital documents can be transferred both faster and cheaper. Digital documents do not suffer from physical aging which can render documents unreadable due to paper or ink decomposition. 3

What must be taken into consideration for electronic documents? Many business documents have to be stored for a retention period. An electronic image of a paper document is just a copy. Thus, a copy of a document has to be authenticated by a notary or an official person to make it acceptable as evidence by a court or tax authorities. In the case of scanned paper documents, the authentication needs to be done by means of a qualified electronic signature on each electronic document that is generated. According to the European signature directive, the qualified electronic signature is equal to a handwritten signature. This signature needs a secure signature calculation unit this means a smart card, trustworthy card-reading terminal and signature software, which control the access to the private key in a secure way, and a qualified user certificate, which is issued by a trustworthy certification authority (CA). To get such a certificate, the requesting user has to be identified in a secure way by the certification authority. This kind of transformation to legally valid electronic documents enables you to do without paper documents in the business process. And results in fewer costs for a paper archive, thus raising process quality and lowering the processing time within the business process. Recommendations for systems preserving legal certainty (Best Practice) It is necessary to convert paper documents into electronic documents very early in order to get a continuously secured process chain for the processing of electronic documents. To allow the integration of electronic signatures and prevent format conversion for the archive, the document format should be chosen with care. The file formats PDF/A and TIFF have gained international acceptance for compliance with the required archive periods of up to 99 years and more in certain regulations. After conversion the scanned documents must undergo visual examination before processing. If the scanned documents match the paper originals, each document is electronically signed. Technically speaking, a number of paper documents are pooled to form a batch. Close to the time and place of scanning this batch, the paper documents are subjected to a visual examination and the electronic images are generated by the scanners. If the images correspond to the originals, every document is electronically signed. The resulting electronic documents are now authenticated and are valid by law. 4

How Fujitsu can help Fujitsu Secure Mailroom is an end-to-end input management solution used in the trusted and evidencepreserving digitization of documents and incoming mails. The workflow is shown in the picture. Digital Mailroom Capture Solutions Digital Mailroom Workflow, OCR Trusted Viewer, Audit Trail, esignatures (optional) Electronic document Swiss Post Solutions and PFU Swiss Post Solutions Fujitsu Digital Mailroom Scanners Scanner PFU 1 N.N. 2 Special application 3 DMS 4 Workflow 5 Scan Full Range Offering by Fujitsu including modular Components 6 Bulk signatures 7 Single signature 8 Validation of evidence 9 Storage (documents and digital evidence) Trustworthy Long Term Preservation 5 6 7 4 8 3 SecDocs 2 9 1 Trustcenter Certificates & Timestamps Fujitsu Open interfaces (connectors) enable the solution to be linked to any document management systems or workflow systems. This application provides a functionality to preserve the legal certainty of electronic documents after scanning the original paper-based documents. The digitization of documents and subsequent use of meta data is carried out using best-of-breed products specially created for this scenario. Preservation is done by means of qualified electronic signatures on a batch, i.e. a mass signature on a batch of documents after entering the signature PIN only once. The optional, subsequent electronic signature is based on ISO/IEC 15408 and SigG-certified components. Alternatively, signatures can be replaced by TR-03138-compliant audit trails (transfer stamps according to the specifications of the BSI-trusted and replacing scan). The certified TR-03125-compliant long-term storage Fujitsu SecDocs can be integrated into the solution in order to retain the evidentiary value of the digitized documents for decades. This solution can be expanded step-by-step and in a flexible manner in order to establish a high degree of automation and integration in the customer s process landscape. The security kernel of the Fujitsu Secure Mailroom components is supplied by OpenLimit AG, a leading international provider in the field of electronic signatures. This component is certified according to Common Criteria EAL4+ and German signature law by Germany s Federal Office of Information Security (BSI). This enables incoming mail and documents to be distributed quickly, copies are no longer required in the departments, all documents are available and also do not have to be forwarded. 5

The steps in detail: Input management Input management has already been in use in public administration and industry for several years. However, the electronic documents are usually devalued before a court as a copy and are thus not evidential. Fujitsu s Secure Mailroom solution provides the option of authenticating the electronic copies according to valid regulations, such as the Administrative Procedures Act (VwVfG) or TR-03138, and thus of producing evidentiary value before a court. The paper originals can be destroyed after the scanning process. Digitalization Fujitsu provides an extremely rugged and high quality product line from its own production with the fi-series scanner for personal use from 3,000 pages per day right up to departmental scanners with a throughput of up to 100,000 pages per day. As an option, digitalization can be further enhanced here through Kofax VRS or hardware based VRS (available in the production class scanners). Entry and data recording The digitalized pages are automatically recognized, indexed and summarized as documents. In the standard configuration this is done by means of barcodes on separate documents. OCR-based processes for field recognition are optionally available. The prointra system of our partner Swiss Post Solutions provides effective quality assurance of the scanned images and index data before the latter are transferred to the following components in the standard formats XML and PDF/A-1b. Integrity assurance The BatchSign application is used in order to authenticate compliance of the images with the paper original, which provides each document with a qualified electronic signature or a transfer stamp as per TR-03138. This application uses the SigG-confirmed and Common Criteria EAL4+-certified signature components from OpenLimit SignCubes. The user loads a batch of documents into the application and makes a random test to determine compliance of the scanned image with the original. Then the batch is signed in a single run and optionally saved in the long-term archive Fujitsu SecDocs. Due to the document type the documents can now be passed to various target mailboxes for further processing. 6

Evidence preservation The evidence value of documents is preserved over decades by the TR-03125-compliant long-term archiving system Fujitsu SecDocs. This system seals the documents with qualified timestamps, which are renewed on a regular basis. Document integrity is ensured by means of RFC 4998-compliant Evidence Records, irrespective of the type of storage technology used. This archive uses the SigG-confirmed and Common Criteria EAL4+-certified signature components from OpenLimit SignCubes. Price concept In principle, the price of the solution is based on the annual paper volume in pages. To start using trusted scanning very quickly Fujitsu offers a guide based on ready-made solutions T-shirt configurations from 100,000 pages up to 10,000,000-page scan volumes per year. The configuration includes the right scanners, software licenses and volume licenses with a basic function for the respective size. Expandability Every Fujitsu Secure Mailroom component can also be purchased individually and adapted to customerspecific requirements. The ready-made solutions can also be expanded in every direction and at any time according to customer requirements. 7

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