Case Study "interServ GmbH"

A system that moves mountains: Automated mailroom

The cream of electronic mailroom solutions - fast, secure and without compromises. Three interServ GmbH offices in Germany process up to a quarter million documents a day, reading, verifying and sorting them for forwarding - all on the day they arrive. An electronic document processing system optimized for this volume moves these daily mountains of mail automatically. Based on proven components and carefully-designed processes, the solution guarantees optimal handling and time savings for fast customer service. Documents arriving in the morning have all been processed by the afternoon.

The User

interServ GmbH is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Post. The company is present at 15 locations throughout Germany and is an independent service provider for comcomplex business processes, electronic data acquisition and call centers. It also provides scanning services for forms such as utility meter reading cards and certificates of delivery.

The Requirements

Orders for formal service of documents through the post office regulate the delivery of official documents in accordance with the German Code of Civil Procedure. Upon delivery, Deutsche Post issues a public certificate of delivery for the client.

At peak times, around 100,000 documents a day reach the largest interServ scanning center in Hamburg. Processing this volume - scanning the documents, extracting the information they contain, running plausibility checks and sorting the documents according to content, all on the day they arrive - is a real challenge. But not only is the volume significant, the documents themselves also place high demands on automated processing systems. Certificates of delivery from clients such as courts, public prosecutors and administrative fine offices tend to have a yellow base color in a variety of shades, with information entered automatically (generally by the client) and by hand (by the carrier).

In addition, interServ needed the solution quickly - the project was to be realized in four months, from the award of the contract to the start of regular operations!

The Solution

The same application, based on identical products and product versions, was deployed at all three locations - Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Nürnberg. The solution consists of scanners, recognition software and validation workstations controlled by a capture workflow. The scale of the project already becomes apparent with the scanners. Two IBML ImageTrac4 scanners with 15 pockets each and a total throughput of nearly 15,000 images per hour were installed at each location. An additional ImageTrac4 scanner with three pockets is in use in Karlsruhe.

The general rule for all recognition processes is that better image quality leads to better recognition results. The scanners deployed in this project deliver highest precision at unbelievable speeds, and thus the best preconditions for data extraction with RecoStar Professional character recognition software. RecoStar Professional has a wide range of image preprocessing functions to optimize highly inhomogeneous document material by removing existing lines, punched holes and stray pixels in the document image, providing a good basis for character recognition. Over 20 recognition stations are set up in parallel, with the recognition of the scanned documents taking place virtually at scanning speed. RecoStar Professional has been among the world's best recognition engines for years. The software is so accurate that possible recognition inaccuracies can be checked at scanning speed with only five validation workstations per scanner. To make the most of the hardware's potential, the recognition takes place as a background process on the validation workstations, without interfering with the work of the validation staff.

After recognizing and checking the data for plausibility, the documents are sorted in a second scanning run. The barcode applied automatically during the first scan is now read and linked to the sorting information obtained during the recognition and plausibility check. The freely configurable sort runs currently map 130 different sorting states. Thanks to sophisticated cascading, documents are sorted after an average of 1.3 sort runs. The documents are then placed in envelopes and returned to the clients. The entire operation is controlled by the BUSY 6.6 capture workflow, a powerful application that securely and effectively controls and monitors every document processing stage.

The Benefits

It was a challenge for everyone involved, but the project's ultimate success was never in doubt. And the results speak for themselves - same-day document processing. Impossible to manage by hand, document processing became simple, fast and reliable with an automatic mailroom solution, from scanning to automatic sorting. The high automation rate thus achieved is the key. And interServ agrees: "The system's outstanding recognition results are essential to our success."

Deutsche Post is also very satisfied with the effective implementation of its requirements: "The impressive way in which interServ and Open Text Document Technologies tackled the project is indeed a success story." The clients of interServ GmbH can also be satisfied with the company's fast, reliable processing of delivery certificates.

And the realization time? As requested - four months!

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