Digitize extensive paper archive with Kinetic AG

Application requirements

One of KINETIC AG’s customers is an insurance company who operates a competence center in Switzerland for people handicapped by health issues. They provide a service that gives these people an opportunity to lead an independent life. The competence center counsels and supports their clients, and arranges for appropriate services.

Due to a move of location, the company decided to convert all of their paper dossiers into digital format. Space constraints as well as the growing length of time it took to retrieve files for an assessment were key issues in this decision. Factors like time, security and completeness of insurance dossiers place a high demand on the process – both from an organizational as well as a technical point of view. The paper archive contains approximately 10 million documents.

Originally, the standard import function from KINETIC AG included a solution from a traditional provider as middleware between windream ECM and the high-performance scanners from Pitney Bowes. Due to unsolvable technical problems, or rather an inadequate architecture for this solution, a suitable substitute had to be found quickly. The requirement was that the software had to carry out its task in a stable manner with reliable quality, and in case of error no untraceable circumstances could arise. Additional focus was placed on the conversion speed, the quality of the generated PDF and the file size.

Customer benefits

Previously, employees of the insurance company had to access two different systems to process a dossier.

One was the main software application which contained selected documents in electronic format, and the other was the paper archive. This complicated the work and created long processing times when carrying out assessments.

With the digitization of the paper files and the availability of all information in digital format, the insurance company profits in addition to a reduced through-put time from further improvements, for example multiple users being able to access the same document concurrently and a freed-up archive room through elimination of the paper archive.

In addition, converting to the ISO standard format PDF/A, which was developed for long-term archiving, enables a flexible use of the documents. The products from PDF Tools AG guarantee a quick and stable processing and an excellent document quality. The insurance company also profits from a flexible and future-oriented integration in the existing processes and solutions.

Implementation

Digitizing an existing paper archive and subsequently destroying the paper copies requires a well-thought process and a high level of quality assurance. The process was therefore so structured that all dossiers are registered before the actual scanning and identified with a barcode. The five high-performance scanners in use create images of the records (as jpg files) and the respective processing information (number of pages, content description etc.). PDF Tools AG’s part of the solution extracts the barcode information.

Afterwards, the jpg documents are processed. The first step uses the 3-Heights® TIFF Tool Suite and the OCR Add-on to convert the individual images to searchable PDF/A documents. The processed documents are then saved in the DMS archive. Indexing of the files includes also important processing information (number of scanned pages, number of processed pages etc.).

The last step in the process is the quality control. Employees verify the content of the electronic dossiers and the processing information. This is accomplished through displaying the generated PDF files using a 3-Heights® Viewer component that was enhanced specifically for the insurance company. Release of the dossiers through the quality assurance group triggers the legally compliant long-term archiving and gives the order for the paper copies to be destroyed.