Standard Life scans £1.1 million in savings

Financial services firm Standard Life is saving £1.1 million annually with a new optical character recognition (OCR) and document workflow project.

By upgrading its Kodak scanner fleet, it has introduced automated document indexing and workflows to speed the processing of 10 million paper documents it receives from customers each year.

Standard Life has replaced 13-year-old Kodak 9500 series scanners with five high-volume Kodak i660 document scanners to process all incoming post sent by customers to its Edinburgh-based head office.

Combined with new document capture and OCR imaging technology from EMC Captiva, the new scanning capability has sped up document handling process and efficiency, where 80 per cent of mail can now be scanned for electronic delivery.

Jason Hewitt, Standard Life’s scanning and retrieval operations manager, explained that documents scanned into the company’s existing automated workflow distributor (AWD) software were time consuming to process.

“Staff would have to manually index the mail based on a work-type category, whether it be a customer advising of a change of address, or wanting to switch pension funds or take out a new policy and so on,” he said.

“This could get complicated given we have 16 main processing areas based on product type and 300 work queues.”

In support of tight service levels the Document Services team has to meet, the project streamlined this business process to enhance efficiency, improve accuracy of processing and free staff from laborious mail indexing activities.

The deployment of new Kodak scanners, EMC Captiva Input Accel document capture software and EMC Captiva Dispatcher document recognition system using OCR technology has reduced the manpower effort to process mail by 30 per cent, saving £990,000 per annum.

Money saved by rationalising and standardising hardware and associated services also totalled £100,000 per annum. And 24 redeployed staff now enable the Document Services team to take on additional work.

“Gallup does an annual staff engagement survey for us and one of the questions asked was whether people feel they have the materials and equipment to do their work right," Hewitt added. "Since the introduction of the EMC Captiva software and new Kodak scanners, the score for Document Services has increased 10 per cent, which puts us in the top quartile of Gallup’s Finance and Insurance database.”

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