Whether you want to automate workflows or capture data from paper documents, our range of process automation solutions – combined with our can-do attitude to mapping out your processes – enable you to automate manual tasks, reduce manual data entry and modernise your organisation.
Working with leading authors, we build bespoke automated data capture and business process management solutions based on solid, well-supported products to help you optimise operations, improve productivity, accelerate growth, and meet regulatory requirements. Our process automation solutions include:
From simple ad-hoc departmental workflows to full enterprise business process management, we bring order to complex processes.
At ePC, we spend time with you to understand what problems you are trying to solve, what the current “As Is” process is and what your “Future” desired state looks like.
Once we have mapped out your process(es), business process management software (BPMS) is used to implement your perfect solution.
Our eForms platform enables you to build rich, dynamic and secure electronic forms that work and behave in an intuitive way.
Platform features include real-time data validation, user authentication, automated notifications, workflow automation, dashboard reports, audit trails for regulatory compliance, and much more.
Whether you need to migrate from paper to an electronic form or want to get online as quickly as possible, we can build a bespoke eForm to meet your needs.
Although simple data capture processes may consist of electronic forms with data exports, it is often necessary to pass form data from one participant to another for authorisation, review or other action.
Our low-code BPMS platforms include point-and-click workflow engines to graphically model and execute your business process(es).
This allows you to automate your organisation - reducing the load on your users while adhering to corporate policies and compliance regulations.
Automatically capture, read and extract data from paper forms using OMR, ICR, OCR, and barcode recognition technology.
Our automated data capture solutions reduce manual data entry by 90% or more with human intervention minimised to a few keystrokes.
Collect more accurate data faster with fewer resources.
Our UK-based and operated document scanning services service offers organisations access to document scanning equipment and the latest forms processing software.
The service is designed for organisations with quick turnaround, low-frequency data capture projects.
If you have a backlog of paper, or an infrequent need to capture data from forms, we have the resources to help.
We are a solutions partner you can trust. Our focus is on delivering scalable solutions and nurturing long term relationships rather than selling boxed software and hitting quarterly sales targets.
When you work with us, we spend time with you to understand the problems you face before searching our toolbox to find - or create – the best process automation solutions to solve your unique challenges.
Trust a company with decades of industry experience to get up and running quicker - with less reliance on internal resources.
With eForms, the accuracy and timeliness of data collection has improved immeasurably. This was not possible with paper and means we can begin analysis much quicker to establish if the FIT can accurately detect colorectal cancer in patients.
Monica Haritakis, Clinical Trial Manager, York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
We are certified resellers of BP Logix Process Director and ABBYY FlexiCapture as well as OpenText OEM partners specialising in TeleForm and LiquidOffice.
TeleForm automatically captures and indexes data and images from any form type, using handprint (ICR), machine print (OCR) and checkbox (OMR) recognition technology, ready for export to a database.
It aims to reduce manual data entry time by 90% or more and can eliminate hundreds of operator keystrokes.
BP Logix Process Director is an award-winning no\low-code BPM platform for creating rich digital applications.
Dynamic dashboards, powerful eForms, advanced workflows and extensive reporting combine to deliver a comprehensive business process management solution.
ABBYY FlexiCapture is a highly scalable forms processing solution for intelligent and accurate extraction of data from structured, semi-structured and unstructured forms and documents for input into backend applications for further processing and archiving.
Fully web-based, LiquidOffice is a BPM software solution for creating, deploying and automatically managing the routing, tracking and approval processes for electronic forms. It encompasses the entire business process management lifecycle, from process design and workflow simulation to deployment and optimisation.
Automation of the bonus timesheet has been a major step forward. In the past, it took one-person 2½ days a week to manipulate the data and manually key the information into payroll. We’ve reduced this time by almost two days already, but we anticipate further efficiencies in the next phase...
Richard Churchill, Productivity Support Manager, Next Distribution Ltd
Millennium and Copthorne (M&C) Hotels Plc manage CapEx requests with cloud-hosted capital expenditure approval and tracking software.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) use LiquidOffice to capture data and manage the automated workflow of up to 200,000 RIDDOR submissions a year.
Following a OJEU tender process, the British Council commissioned Civica as the prime contractor to deliver an on-screen marking (OSM) solution to mark up to 2.25 million ‘pen and paper’ IELTS tests each year.
As part of the agreement, Civica appointed ePC as its sub-contractor for the script capture, processing and verification work.
Reading School release exam results faster by outsourcing OMR scanning to ePC's document scanning bureau.
Keele CTU saves time by capturing data from paper-based clinical trials with TeleForm.
Rentokil Initial automate CapEx approval processes in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the USA with Process Director.
Based at the University of Bristol, the ‘Children of the 90s’ study uses TeleForm to capture data from the paper versions of their questionnaires.
Expert in language assessment automates paper-based assessments with OMR exam processing and on-screen marking system.
MMS save 37.5 hours per week and reduce manual data entry by 80% with TeleForm based timesheet automation system.
I also want to thank you for your excellent service and support this year, it is always much appreciated and you are a valued supplier.
Technical Analyst, Cambridge University Press & Assessment
The implementation has been a smooth process. ePC have been really helpful throughout the project. They were able to offer advice when designing / planning the eCRF and help us iron out challenges before they became major issues. Their advice has really helped us focus on what data we needed to collect in order to meet trial objectives and regulatory requirements. I highly recommend them to other CTU’s seeking to implement an eForms system.
Monica Haritakis, Clinical Trial Manager, York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Teleform/ePC have been the lynchpin of data collection in our home diagnostic clinical trials for many years. As a small team, the software has given us cost-effective and flexible control to manage a diverse range of paper-based trials using a fully-featured form designer with support for downstream verification workflows all the way to export, while ePC have been instrumental in managing and maintaining the service availability with a high standard of professionalism and technical capability
SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH
As an IT support group, we offer our business colleagues choices. The decision to select Process Director/Cloud Edition was made by the Divisional CFO, as the prototype of the CapEx process worked to his satisfaction. From an IT perspective we were also genuinely pleased with the pilot
Chris Broe, Group Chief Information Officer, Rentokil Initial
Designing, processing and analysing thousands of questionnaires a year requires an effective and efficient data capture system. TeleForm, provided by ePC, has been the central hub to this system for many years - we could not function without it.
Sue Thrower, RAF Cranwell
ePC understood what we wanted. On a number of occasions, we described roughly what we would like in terms of capability but not in any great detail. They captured the simplicity of what was required without compromising on functionality.
Nick Taylor, Finance Director, Millennium and Copthorne Hotels Plc
We were mindful of the CapEx – and product creation – systems ePC had implemented and aware they worked well. In the end, the system had a lot of ticks against it and we did not see the value of going to another supplier when ePC had a box of tricks that worked well for us.
Robert Woods, Finance Manager, Initial
Process Director
4.6 / 5 | 16 reviews
Process Director
4.7 / 5 | 27 reviews
TeleForm
4.5 / 5 | 2 reviews
Process Director
4.5 / 5 | 30 reviews
Business Process Management, or BPM, is a term that often conjures up images of tremendous complexity and exhaustive effort with months of planning, committees, and meetings.
In this guide, we aim to simplify BPM and offer practical advice on how to successfully implement it as part of your organisation's digital transformation.
Business Process Management, or BPM, is a term that often conjures up images of tremendous complexity and exhaustive effort with months of planning, committees, and meetings.
In this guide, we aim to simplify BPM and offer practical advice on how to successfully implement it as part of your organisation's digital transformation.
Table of contents
What is BPM?There is no universally agreed definition of BPM. According to BPM.com, an online resource for the BPM industry, BPM is:
a discipline involving any combination of modelling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimisation of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries
Put simply, BPM is a methodology for maintaining and improving processes within a business to increase efficiency and profitability.
Passing a routine piece of paper to a co-worker is a business process. It’s when you establish rules and a method, either manual or technological, to govern how and when that piece of paper is distributed that you enter the realm of BPM. Mapping out the process steps, rules and users will involve a discussion of the following areas:
Once you have identified the processes, business process management software (BPMS) can be used to implement your methodology and deployed for users to perform their roles.
There can be some confusion about the differences between BPM and workflow, partly because they are used interchangeably by some BPM professionals.
As we saw above, BPM is the methodology of identifying, maintaining and improving processes within a company. BPMS is a technology platform designed to implement the methodology and includes forms, business rules, workflow, business activity monitoring, document management, and application integration.
Workflow, on the other hand, is a series of repeatable steps that are necessary in order to complete the process.
In reality, workflow is one part of BPM - the part that models your business process(es) – and is embedded into business process management suites (BPMS).
The BPM lifecycle is generally considered to have five stages: design, model, execute, monitor, and optimise.
Step 1
The first phase of the BPM lifecycle involves identifying the process you wish to automate and writing down the current steps, actions, people and decisions that need to occur for both the "happy path" and all "what if" scenarios.
Step 2
Business process modelling can be used to map out the current (or “as-is”) process and design the future (or “to-be”) state before creating the roles, steps, business rules and forms within a BPM suite.
Step 3
Deploy your form and workflow for the process participants. This will be web-accessible and often cloud-hosted with integration to existing systems and eMail for lookups, validaton, export and communication.
Step 4
Provide user and management dashboards and reports to identify process bottlenecks and continuously track and evaluate how your business processes are performing over time.
Step 5
Make small but targeted improvements to the forms and workflows, fix bottlenecks based on insights from continuous monitoring to make your process more efficient and easier to use.
Step 6
When the process becomes too complex or inefficient, and optimisation is not seeing the desired output, it may be time to re-engineer a new version of the entire process cycle.
Want to learn more about the phases of the BPM lifecycle? Read our blog.
BP Logix Process Director is an award-winning low-code BPM platform for creating rich digital applications.
Fully web-based, LiquidOffice is a business process management solution for creating, deploying and automatically managing the routing, tracking and approval processes for electronic forms.
BPMS provides the BPM tools required to automate all your business processes and improve your results. Typically, a BPMS platform should include the following tools or components:
to design responsive digital forms to gather and display information
to graphically model complex business processes
to build re-usable business rules and embed them into forms and workflows
to provide visibility into how your business processes are running
to provide scheduled or off-line data analysis for form and process data
to route and monitor case-orientated operations that may include disparate forms and sub-processes
to support both users (internal and external) and groups of users as well as control who has access to documents, forms and folders via Access Control Lists (ACLs)
to offer data security and stability with HTTPS (SSL/TLS) connection, audits logs, user permissions and form data encryption
to connect to - and exchange information with - existing databases and legacy systems
to provide access from any browser, operating system or mobile device with all major platforms (including iOS and Android) supported
to rapidly create digital applications without programming
to create re-usable bespoke code for advanced integration and functionality
Automation can help to eliminate redundant steps and accelerate approval cycles, leveraging parallel steps where possible, to improve productivity and staff morale
A BPMS will greatly reduce the amount of paperwork circulating in an organisation which can lead to cost savings in storage, printing and labour
Alter in-flight processes in real-time and receive notifications if a workflow is predicted to be late. Easily discover bottlenecks in a process and intervene to keep things running smoothly
BPM minimises errors and problems due to lost, inaccurate or mishandled requests; reducing the prospect of the form being rejected or being passed back to the originator for clarification
BPM accelerates the approval of internal projects. All members of a group or team can simultaneously perform process tasks with automatic eMail alerts to notify people when a task is assigned
BPM ensures process consistency. Whether you run a process once or a thousand times, you can be assured the correct and auditable process was followed
BPM can track and record every meaningful transaction in a way that can be retraced later by managers, auditors and regulators
BPM provides insight into your critical tasks, allowing management to review process metrics and statuses to intercede if necessary. This allows nimble organisations to make timely decisions to satisfy customer needs
BPM proactively identifies process bottlenecks, as metrics can be reviewed and analysed to identify opportunities for business process improvement
Want to learn why business process management is important to organisations? Read our blog.
We talk with companies of all sizes and shapes and, even though their industries vary, their challenges are often quite similar.
Common BPM challenges and pain points include:
Many companies use BPMS for internal forms, e.g. new employee onboarding, benefit applications, purchase orders or timesheets. The form submission starts a process where multiple people review, update, and approve the information submitted. Common examples include:
If you need a solution where forms are filled in and submitted before being saved to a database or archived, you may not require full scale BPM. A simple forms processing solution may suit your needs better.
iBPMS stands for 'Intelligent Business Process Management Software'. The term was coined by Gartner Inc., the world's leading research and advisory company, to address the evolution of BPM capabilities.
It goes beyond traditional BPM software and adds more capabilities for greater intelligence within business processes. It includes integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management.
Low-code development, machine learning, case management. Want to know what business process management trends will shape the industry in 2022?
The concept of BPM often invokes thoughts of tremendous complexity. Here, we outline the reasons why business process management is important to organisations.
Learn more about the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD).
New to business process management?
Learn more about the five stages of the BPM life-cycle: design, model, execute, monitor, and optimise.
Are you laying the groundwork for BPM?
In this blog, we offer practical advice for organisations planning a BPM implementation.
Automate your critical tasks with a BPMS solution from ePC. Talk to us today to discuss your requirements.
We will not share your details outside of our organisation and will only contact you to discuss your enquiry. Read our privacy policy.
Welcome to our media centre. In this section, you can find:
Thought provoking blog on BPM, data capture and information technology.
Browse our library of case studies highlighting the BPM, workflow automation and data capture solutions we have implemented.
A series of guides on BPM, automated data capture and digital transformation.
You can also read product FAQs and review our training courses.
From FTSE listed companies to NHS trusts and local councils, ePC work with nearly 200 global clients, delivering data capture and BPM projects in the UK and abroad. Scroll down to read the case studies and learn more about we can help your business.
Next Distribution automates the processing of their weekly ‘productivity bonus scheme’ timesheet for 4,500 full-time employees at six UK distribution centres.
The TeleForm based timesheet automation system has accelerated bonus processing, saving two days per week and 750 hours a year.
MMS save 37.5 hours per week and reduce manual data entry by 80% with TeleForm based timesheet automation system.
Reading School release exam results faster by outsourcing OMR scanning to ePC's document scanning bureau.
Keele CTU saves time by capturing data from paper-based clinical trials with TeleForm.
York Teaching Hospital saves 165 hours throughout Phase III clinical study by moving from paper to electronic case report forms (eCRF).
Following a OJEU tender process, the British Council commissioned Civica as the prime contractor to deliver an on-screen marking (OSM) solution to mark up to 2.25 million ‘pen and paper’ IELTS tests each year.
As part of the agreement, Civica appointed ePC as its sub-contractor for the script capture, processing and verification work.
Based at the University of Bristol, the ‘Children of the 90s’ study uses TeleForm to capture data from the paper versions of their questionnaires.
Millennium and Copthorne (M&C) Hotels Plc manage CapEx requests with Process Director.
Leading UK university uses TeleForm to design, scan and verify OMR answer sheets from undergraduate and postgraduate examinations.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) use LiquidOffice to capture data and manage the automated workflow of up to 200,000 RIDDOR submissions a year.
Royal Air Force implement TeleForm to measure and evaluate training effectiveness at RAF Cosford, RAF Cranwell and RAF Halton.
Bath Spa University automate employee expense claims and lecturer’s payments with LiquidOffice.
Chevron Texaco implements health & safety reporting software to scan and analyse incident data on four North Sea oil rigs.
South East Wales Trials Unit (SEWTU) at Cardiff University use TeleForm to capture clinical trial data from questionnaires, patient feedback forms and CRF’s.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust uses TeleForm to collate training feedback and measure effectiveness from mental health practitioners.
Monarch Recruitment automates supply teachers’ school placement with a TeleForm-based timesheet processing system which integrates directly into pay-and-bill systems.
MenAfriCar and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine use TeleForm to study meningococcal carriage in the African meningitis belt.
Surgical & Interventional Trials Unit (SITU) at UCL use TeleForm to manage follow-up information from patients involved in clinical trials.
Building Research Establishment (BRE) implement LiquidOffice to automate supplier certification service.
Summerleaze reduces manual data entry, optimise performance and expand capacity with a TeleForm-based change monitoring system that gathers data from 20 electricity generation sites.
University College Birmingham uses TeleForm to design and process student satisfaction surveys.
Skipton Building Society eliminates manual processing of credit application forms with TeleForm-based solution.
