Our Customer, an authorised Financial Services Provider established in 1996, is driven by excellent service quality. They know that accurate data capture and record archive and management are the very cornerstone of successful scheme administration and that the timeous handling of membership enquiries and the payment of claims guarantees an atmosphere of trust and confidence in the service. For these reasons they chose OutProsys to entrust their data processing requirements.
Financial
Financial Services Data Capture Case Study – High-Volume Application Processing and Document Scanning
Financial Services
Application Processing & Document Digitisation
OutProsys helped a financial services client manage large volumes of membership application forms by implementing document scanning, data capture and validation workflows, improving accuracy, turnaround time and overall processing efficiency.
Our customer, based in Johannesburg South Africa, was awarded a major contract to administer the membership database of one of the largest trade unions in the country. The contract required them to manage hundreds of thousands of application forms with volumes that would fluctuate monthly and could not be pre-determined or forecasted with accuracy
Our customer had a small internal team of data entry operators that traditionally captured the handwritten information from hard copy forms. Our customer was looking for an outsourced solution which would give them piece of mind when it came to managing their significant increase in volumes. They were guided by the following key criteria:
- Reliable document scanning solution
- Fixed cost per unit pricing model
- Capacity to manage the volumes
- Guaranteed levels of accuracy
- 1 to 5 day turnaround based on priority
- Web Portal access to scanned documents
- Detailed exception reports
- Off-site back up of images
- Full visibility of the process
OutProsys first invested time in understanding the current work-flow processes and then designed, developed and implemented a bespoke document scanning and data capture from image solution using their experience, capabilities and leading edge technology with no upfront costs.
Applications are now batched at our customer’s premises before being prepared and fed through the automatic document feeder of the high speed Fujitsu scanner we installed on-site. Our scan application, developed in Python (Qt) and running on a Debian GNU/Linux operating system, records a unique batch number and job id for every batch before scanning the batch. This process is then followed by an image enhancement before the images are zipped and securely uploaded to our document management Web Portal via https. All applications scanned are immediately visible on our Web Portal which provides the following key benefits:
- providing secure access to only authorised users
- tracking receipts, returns and backlog of application forms
- hosting the scanned documents and captured data
- ability to search, view, download and print application forms
- verifying the completeness and validity of the document scanning process
Once the image files have been successfully uploaded to our production facility, they are first copied onto backup servers on-site and then copied off-site to our disaster recovery site. The images are then pre-processed and prepared for capture. All data on every image goes through a double capture process whereby the data is first captured by a key operator and then re-captured by a second more experienced verify operator which involves each character being checked and compared to the original data. Characters that do not match the original data will be re-captured and re-verified. During the data capture process, our data entry program will check the attributes assigned to each field to ensure the validity of all data captured. Field checking typically includes any of the following: alpha or numeric checking, modulus 10 or 11 check digits (ID Numbers), range checks, table lookups (Address), date checks, mandatory enter, or mandatory fill. The captured data is then post-processed using various business rules to ensure the completeness, accuracy and validity of the final data. An output file is then produced in our customers required format and sent to them.
Our document processing solution has addressed and exceeded each of our customer’s requirements as we continue to strive toward providing service excellence.