Scan to Attachment the real world process

What’s the process that most of you use for getting a scanned document into E10?

I’m talking the real world stuff. Like, scanning a suppliers packing slip, to attach to a PO Receipt entry.

I understand the Attachments in E10. But the variability of scanners (and their software) seem to break any possible seamless integration of the two.

Our current process is:

  1. Launch scanner software on the workstation the scanner is connected to.
  2. Scan the document, saving it on the local workstation
  3. In E10, attach the document, selecting the type, browsing to the file, and giving it a title.

The part about having to browse to the documents location, and then naming it, are error prone for us.

Any customization that could initiate the scan?

Is TWAIN still a thing?
(might be showing my age with that one)

LOL - yep, we’re that old. It’s still around, but has been replaced by ISYS (?) drivers… and some improved USB drivers… so it depends on with what the application is expecting to talk to the device.

We drag and drop most things other than Job travelers and Packing slips(receipts) from email. We even have a number of RICOH multifunction devices with destinations preset (buttons) so users can scan to themselves and file appropriately. Sometimes that is renaming, most of the time not. The copier gives it a unique name, and dropping it into the UI allows the user to give it a ‘human’ name.

But when the filename auto generated by the scanner/copier, is like
XEROX110_20200828_132455.pdf

And there are dozens in that folder (all with similar names), its not always easy to make sure the file you browsed to (or even grabbed for drag-and-drop) is the one that you actually want.

True that! A mass file dump is a PITA. We used to have that before Docstar.

We don’t dump to the file folder for all those ad-hoc attachments - the copier sends to the user’s email and they process it at their leisure (usually immediately). We take the hit inside exchange, but it eliminates the confusion of a single file dump.

In the case of the Job Travelers and Packing Slips, we do dump to the file folder because the barcode recognition process (or packslip workflow that manually collects metadata) eliminates the need to know what the OS filename is. Part of the workflow sets the ‘title’ metadata field, and the attachment back to Epicor does the rest…

In either scenario, the OS filename effectively gets ‘lost’ and is no longer useful.

Years back I added a button to receipt entry to scan supplier packing slips from a USB scanner. (With TWAIN) It was a really nice process, the user would enter the the receipt, load the packing slip into the scanner and hit scan. To choose a scanner I looked at the list of scanners that Laserfiche supports and tested two. I told IT they needed to pick one of those scanners wherever this was going to be used.

I also had a external app the talked to a scanner and attached job travelers after they were complete. Sometimes drawings would get updated on the floor or there would be important info notes on the traveler so it was important to keep them. The job travelers had a QR code on the from and the scanner would attach create a pdf of the traveler and any related paperwork automatically. All the user had to do was remove the stables and stack as many travelers in the scanner as they wanted. This was also done with out going packing slips to capture the driver signature.