Our customer, a large UK based Service Bureau, has been providing products and services for over 10 years to the road haulage industry. They focus on capturing and analysing digital and analogue Tachographs for over 250 blue chip clients within the transport, retailing, industrial and manufacturing industries.

In 2001 they were processing internally less than 50 000 Tachograph charts per week. The majority were hard copies, sent to them via clients’ post office boxes. The mail was opened, sorted, and scanned at the production facility in the UK. The scanned images were then analysed and manually single captured. The analysed data was then returned back to their customers up to 5 days later.

Given the challenges inherent in document processing namely high cost, labour intensiveness and error prone procedures, our customer then decided to search the market for alternative document processing solutions, guided by the following criteria:

• increasing weekly volume capacity by over 100%
• reducing direct processing costs by at least 50%
• reducing turnaround time from 5 days to less than 48 hours
• improving overall data accuracy to greater than 98%

In addition to the rigorous benchmark requirements set above, by our customer, we were also required to seamlessly integrate into their in-house Information Management System. We successfully completed both benchmark and pilot processes meeting and exceeding their high standards set including the ability to meet their current and future processing requirements.

The entire process at our customer was overhauled with the result that the majority of Tachographs are now scanned onsite at the transport depots, then securely transmitted to a server we manage at our customer in the UK. From there we synchronise the electronic images, utilising a secure encrypted SSH connection, with our local servers at our Document Management facility in Salt River, Cape Town (South Africa), where we utilise a combination of our leading edge recognition technologies, highly trained & experienced data entry operators to Double Capture the handwritten text from the scanned electronic images. This double capture process combined with matching processes, predefined business rules and validation routines, ensures that our captured data is accurate, complete and valid.

Within 4 to 24 hours, depending on Job priorities, the validated electronic information is then post processed into our customers required format and uploaded via the secure encrypted SSH connection to their server in the UK ready for import into their Information Management System. Our online statistics via the Web Portal, provides a secure real time visibility to our customer of all their jobs in the system including detailed statistics on receipts, returns, backlogs, queues and full job search, prioritise & remove capabilities.

With our improved Document Management Solution our customer has fulfilled & exceeded their original success criteria as follows:

• volume of charts now returned are in excess of 120% of previous volumes
• direct processing costs have been reduced by over 55%
• turnaround times are now maintained under 24 hrs
• accuracy levels are consistently above 99.9%
• seamless integration with their In-house Information Management System has occurred