Start a process via the scanning of a document

[ferrig]

Hi all,

first of all I'm really new to Bizagi so my "wordings" could be a bit "generic".
I'm trying out Bizagi in the perspective of using it to automate processes in the domain of managing "paper" documents in an electronic way.
For this the first step in is to create an electronique version of the paper document to work-on.
Therefore I have to create a workflow that is started by the scanning of a document via a TWAIN compliant scanner installed on one or more client PC.

For this I have 2 ideas that I have to investigate:

Idea 1 (for high volume, centralised scanning)
Some external and independent scanning software will be used to scan batches of documents. This sw will be used to check image quality and to generate individual PDFs (one for each document in the batch). These PDFs and some metadata (probably in XML format) will be delivered in some shared drive. Bizagi will now read this data and generate a process per document (PDF) reading also the associated metadata probably used as first routing mechanisme.

Idea 1 (for low volume/de-centralised scanning)
From the client PC the Bizagi web application is opened and a new task is created. Within the Bizagi page a scanning application is called via some kind of "Scan" button and the result of the scanning is loaded in the task. Any metadata will be manually entered in the Bizagi page.

Did anybody already implement/integrate some kind of scanning solution? What sw/library/DLL/... was used ? how did you integrate the scanning sw with Bizagi? What are the problems that you had to tackle and fix (syncronisation, DB space for files, External WebDAV repository, temporary files, etc..)?

Any information, examples, ideas, experiances are more that welcommed.

Thanks

[BizAgi Xpress Support]

Dear Ferrig
Thank you for your interes in Bizagi.

Indeed it is possible to consider in Bizagi an automated behaviour for your described requirement.

For the “low volume/de-centralized scanning” scenario, you can choose to embed any application (sw/library/DLL/) into Bizagi processes.
In this approach, the custom application can be graphically accessible from an activity’s form (UI) from the client side of the solution.

This means that this application should use the APIs, as provided by the vendor of that peripheral device (for example, a scanner).
To view a basic example about how to embed an application inside a Bizagi form, please review: http://wiki.bizagi.com/en/index.php?title=How_to_embed_an_application_in_Bizagi

For the “high volume, centralised scanning” scenario (which would seem more appropriate and recommended), you may choose to use custom jobs (http://wiki.bizagi.com/en/index.php?title=Custom_Jobs), which are basically business rules in Bizagi that can be executed as scheduled tasks.

In the business rule set to be executed by the custom job, you could have a periodical revision of a path (a shared folder) in which batch-scanned files are placed.
Once there is a document scanned, and for each found document, you may start a process in Bizagi (trigger a new case). Within the new case’s information, you may attach the scanned document to the case as an file-type attribute in Bizagi’s data model.

To view how to create business rules in Bizagi and to attach files to cases from these rules, view: http://wiki.bizagi.com/en/index.php?title=Expressions, http://wiki.bizagi.com/en/index.php?title=Advanced_File_Management.

Best regards,
Bizagi BPM Suite Support.

[ferrig]

Hi again,

Thanks for all the usefull information.
Only remark is that all this is quite general information (especialy on how to integrate external applications).
What I real would like to know is if anybody has done a real implementation of this type of process and how.

The reason is that I'm trying to configure a realy simple (but working) POC of a 3 step process:
1. Start a process by scanning a document
2. Add information to the scanned document (the document should be viewed alongside to the entry form for simple lookup)
3. produce in a specified directory on the server a pdf file containing the scanned document and an XML document that contains the information added in step 2

I'm not an expert in Bizagi and unfortunatly short in time. So can anybody help me with a spet by spet followthrough for setting up such a process. Or did anybody tested Bizagi with something similar and is willing to share it?

Thanks for any help