Case Study

Polish Postal Service captures 100 million social security payment slips per year

Most social security payments in Poland are brought directly to retirees by the country's postmen. The pensioners then sign a receipt for the money. The Polish Post Accounting Center is responsible for ensuring that the service is provided correctly and without any errors. This involves electronically archiving and scanning the data from the payment slips, of which approximately 100 million are processed each year. The Polish Postal Service conducts this service for five different social security agencies.

All the slips have to be electronically captured. Being the general contractor for the project that implemented the new system, Open Text Document Technologies needed to combine various products into an overall solution, expand the system already operated at the Accounting Center, and create a stable, functional system. Particular challenges here were the huge number of slips involved and their design, since the various social security agencies use slips of different color and size, and paper quality is generally poor. As such, the performance demands placed on the new system by the Accounting Center were very high.

The slips are delivered continuously to the Accounting Center. In two shifts throughout the month four capture lines run at full capacity and scan and interpret the slips, and - if necessary - post-process them. The overall solution consists of scanners and control and character recognition software. Open Text Document Technologies integrated four Imagetrack scanners from IBML into the system. Each machine scans, in color, up to 10,000 slips of various sizes per hour. With the RecoStar ProfessionalPlus software from Open Text Document Technologies, the slips are then read and interpreted. Open Text Document Technologies developed a solution that archives the images in tif format as unformatted binary images in a RAID hard disk system with a storage capacity of one terabyte. The slips can later be retrieved from a database using an index field with a 14-digit number. Employees at the Polish Post Accounting Center can respond to any inquiries concerning the slips by going online at one of 30 workstations and accessing the data.

Open Text Document Technologies is responsible for supplying and integrating the solution as well as for managing the entire project and training the Accounting Center staff, providing at the same time maintenance and a service hotline, located in Konstanz, Germany.

Scanning capacity of 400,000 slips per day makes the solution from Open Text Document Technologies one of the world's biggest centralized applications.

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