Digital Pen & Paper
Digital Pen & Paper (DP&P) takes an age old convenient way of information gathering and enhancesit.  Developed by Anoto Group AB in Sweden you can capture and transmit information as it is written using a wireless ink pen together with ordinary paper that has the Anoto digital pattern embedded into it. Handwriting is translated into pen strokes and these pen strokes are transmitted either via a mobile phone using GPRS or via a PC using a USB docking station. Using this process, graphical images of original documents and business forms can be delivered to back office systems in less than a minute. Pen strokes can also be converted into data files and delivered as XML. Examples of when you would use the Digital Pen and Paper include creating requisitions (Procurement), snagging (Customer Care) and tick sheets (House Sales). The benefits are high, you are capturing data at source which saves a lot of time as well as improving accuracy substantially.

Handheld devices
We are looking into using handheld devices in COINS. For example, in Facilities Management (FM), operatives can receive details of their jobs via a handheld device. They will be able to tell COINS when they have arrived on site, when they have left a site, and when they have completed their work. They can also log any notes or further details about the job. Furthermore, operatives can capture a signature from the client confirming the work is complete. The information gathered regarding their times arriving on site and leaving the site could be used to populate timesheet information within COINS.

Optical Character Recognition Pens
A number of COINS clients are now either using or testing the use of OCR Pens for input to COINS. The pen comprises a small hand held scanner, which is swiped across printed text or numbers. The pen then inputs this text or number into any input field in COINS as if it had been typed on the keyboard. This technique works equally well with either COINS Plus or COINS Open Architecture. Potential applications already identified include suppliers’ invoice numbers and item descriptions in Purchase Ledger, issue descriptions from customers’ letters in Customer Care, “green card” (or “proforma”) numbers for subcontract payments in VAP, or anywhere that printed text or numbers need to be input to COINS. One example of such a pen is the Iris Pen, which costs just over £100 from www.irislink.com. This includes all the necessary software – no softwaremodifications from COINS are normally required. Considerable interest in this application of new technology with COINS was generated on the final day of each of the recent COINS conferences. The technology initiatives session also covered use of COINS with mobile phones, PDAs and Pentech digital pens (which capture data while it is being hand written).