Central conversion solution ensures quality of more than 90,000 documents daily
Since PDF files were delivered from different source systems, they are available in different PDF standards. Suva therefore needed a central conversion solution for their document management.
Application requirements
At Suva (= Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund), all PDF files belonging to a claim dossier are stored in an enterprise content management system. These documents are either created internally or sent in by external parties. Since the PDF files were delivered from different source systems, they are available in different PDF standards. We therefore needed a central conversion solution for our document management. To meet the long-term archiving requirements, we defined in the project that all PDF files would be stored in accordance with PDF/A-2u. It was primarily important that the PDF/A-2u standard was correctly supported. Central requirements also included the scalability of the solution to be used, a high processing speed and transparent error information.
Customer benefits
The cooperation with PDF Tools is very professional and extremely satisfying. Above all, the good and fast support is a great advantage. PDF Tools is also distinguished by its ability to respond to special requests and enhancements. "Swiss Made" is not just an empty phrase, but a promise.
Our expectations were completely fulfilled. Cooperation, support and bug fixing were very fast, flexible and extremely competent. The solution is used centrally at Suva to enforce the PDF/A-2u standard for all documents that are stored in the dossier. More than 200,000 pages are processed per day. On days when OCR recognition is running, more than 300,000 additional pages are processed.
Implementation
Due to the good reputation on the market, a PoC was carried out with PDF Tools. We were able to quickly integrate the software into our system landscape and successfully perform the first conversions. Adaptations or errors that occurred were solved quickly and very obligingly by the manufacturer. In addition to conversion, OCR recognition is being used in another project together with ABBYY. Here the goal is to extract the text information from the PDF documents and provide it as a JSON file. This information can now be used by other applications for machine processing.
The software is deployed centrally as a shared component and made available to other teams as a microservice. The microservice runs on Openshift and exposes interfaces to abstractly use the underlying functionality of PDF Tools. The PDF Tools 4-Heights® Conversion Service is installed on Windows servers. Using its simple and optimized REST interface, the Java-written microservice can use the functionality to convert to PDF/A-2u.
Products for this case
Brief portrait of SUVA
Suva (= Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund), which has been operating since 1918, employs around 4,200 people at its headquarters in Lucerne, at its 18 agencies throughout Switzerland and at its two rehabilitation clinics in Bellikon and Sion. It insures around 130,000 companies and 2 million employees against the consequences of accidents and occupational diseases. Suva's services include prevention, insurance and rehabilitation.