Documents serve as the artifacts of information exchange and define the basis of re-usable business practices. These business artifacts drive business interactions such as acknowledgements, confirmations, alerts, and clarifications. These interactions are bi-directional between suppliers, partners, customers and employees. So when a document is received by, or sent to a business partner it magnifies the relationship between the parties; a relationship that is usually started by one party having provided goods or services to the other party.

Maintaining and improving the quality of the ongoing conversation between business partners is much more valuable than simply automating document capture. There are four practical examples where intelligent exchange can deliver incremental value and enhance business relationships:

• Using exchange as the very vehicle that transmits documents from sender to recipient, either via fax or as email attachments. This eliminates the cost and time associated with printing and mailing on the sender side, and document receipt, preparation, and scanning on the recipient side.

• Using exchange as an automated notification mechanism to alert a sender that a business application has received the sender’s input, or to indicate what information has actually been captured. This enhances the value of the business relationship by keeping the sender of a document informed about the status of the document as it is processed by the recipient.

• Using exchange as an automated means to alert an internal party about the arrival of certain information in the system, seeking an anticipated action from receiving party, and thereby avoiding more costly human intervention down the line.

• Using exchange as a two-way messaging system to establish a direct dialog between two business parties to handle exceptions, errors, discrepancies, and other action-dependant information.

Significant cost reductions and enhanced relationships with business partners can be realized by creating an environment for straight-through processes. Leveraging exchange to automate exceptions can have a major impact on the direct cost of a business process, since a significant portion of the ongoing cost in a transactional capture solution often goes to manual exception handling performed by costly knowledge workers.