ABBYY FineReader Helps Scanning Service Firm’s Dream Become Reality

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ABBYY FineReader Helps Scanning Service Firm’s Dream Become Reality

Customer:
Digital Imaging and Management Professionals (DIAMP)

Headquarters: Dunedin, Fla.

Founded: September 2001

President: Ken Age

Industry:
Digital imaging and management service provider Law frms, insurance frms, healthcare professionals, government agencies, SMBs, individuals

Clients:
Law frms, insurance frms, healthcare professionals, government agencies, SMBs, individuals

Problem:
Needed accurate, fast and cost-effective scanning and optical-character recognition software to serve its growing base of customers

Solution:
ABBYY FineReader® Professional Edition

Hardware:
Includes Fujitsu scanners, models 4750c; M4097D; 5750c, and M3092DC. Drivers include TWAIN; ISIS; Kofax VRS, and Kofax SVRS.

Results:
Unlike many OCR products, ABBYY FineReader does not require a per-scan or per-image fee, making DIAMP more price-competitive and effcient than many of its competitors. ABBYY FineReader enables DIAMP to vastly reduce the hours spent checking and correcting scanned vs. original documents, a service the frm provides to ensure scanning accuracy.

Accuracy, Cost-Savings Enable DIAMP to Pursue Franchise Goal

Scanning and document-management are the lifeblood of DIAMP, a digital imaging and management service provider that saw an infusion of satisfed customers and proftability after switching to ABBYY from a more expensive system.

“It’s like day and night: ABBYY is much better than the previous OCR software we used,” said Ken Age, president and founder of the Dunedin, Fla.- based service provider. “I was not happy with the OCR software I had originally purchased. I had interviewed other software companies that did the same things as ABBYY – but which were far more expensive than ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition.”

DIAMP scans customers’ documents, formats them into the specifed format such as Microsoft Word or Excel, indexes the scanned pages and destroys the paper documents (unless a client requests otherwise) he said. Business is booming, as organizations seek to meet regulatory concerns about keeping data safely while they compare against the high costs of renting or owning and protecting physical warehouses of papers.

Scanned to Order

To meet the needs of its clients – which include attorneys, insurance frms, medical professionals, government agencies and individuals – DIAMP offers three levels of OCR service and pricing, Age said. In the most inexpensive, level one service, DIAMP scans clients’ documents and converts them into a standard MS Offce program without any manual intervention or proof-reading.
“ABBYY FineReader converts the document to text and I can then save it to Excel or Word or whatever other format the customer wants,” Age said.
DIAMP’s most popular services – level two and level three – have a more hands-on approach. In level two, the service provider manually cleans up any obvious errors created after a document has been scanned and converted. They accomplish this by using ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition’s built-in edit function and then use the native program such as Microsoft Word or Excel, said Age. In the third – and highest – level of service, DIAMP professionals extensively review and work with the scanned and converted documents, he said.

“In level three we’ll make it as perfect as possible, no matter how many hours it takes, and with ABBYY FineReader this time is greatly reduced,” explained Age. “I hardly ever do a level one job, and usually do a level two.”

Since moving to ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition about six years ago, DIAMP has dramatically cut the time employees spend correcting and enhancing clients’ scanned documents, he said. “With the previous OCR software we would spend hours trying to fx things I thought the program should have done,” said Age. “With ABBYY, the only time we spend hours converting documents is when the original is from poor quality paper. Using FineReader, we have OCRed jobs no one else would do. ABBYY allows us to do jobs anyone not using ABBYY could not do, could not do as well, or would fnd prohibitive in production time.”

Some clients bring in papers with handwriting scrawls or multiple pictures and cells in the middle of a typewritten document, he said. “It doesn’t matter if they have pictures and cells from Excel right in the middle of a Word document, and they want it all converted into a Word document,” said Age. “We use the features in ABBYY FineReader to clean it up, and scan the document in a high DPI, such as 300, 400 or even 500.”

Since it is a full-service frm, DIAMP manually reviews documents for all customers; with ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition, this quality control consumes less time. ABBYY’s solution could serve most organizations and individuals ,he said. “Their automated functionality is probably better than anybody else’s,” said Age. “Being a professional scanning and document management frm we go in manually to check and defne elements of a document. But for most companies, ABBYY performs a great job on its own.”

Business Boon

ABBYY FineReader is far more accurate than other programs investigated by DIAMP, allowing the service company to be more effcient. And, due to the superior results from the scanned documents, employees can work on more projects in a given day.

“Sometimes I am astonished by how well FineReader does; I can hardly determine whether a letter is a ‘j’ or a ‘t,’ but ABBYY fgures it correctly almost every time,” said Age. “It does symbols like the copyright sign or the dollar sign. If there’s a table in a document ABBYY will put it in there in the right place and format.”

DIAMP can offer more competitive pricing due to ABBYY’s lower costs, too, he noted. “The problem with a lot of software vendors is that they charge a per-scan or per-image fee or royalty,” said Age. “I wanted to eliminate that charge in order to keep the costs down, for both my clients and my company. ABBYY doesn’t charge these extra fees, meaning I can stay ahead of my competitors by not passing those costs down to my customers.”

DIAMP already expected a superior level of scanning and optical character recognition at the onset from ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition, but, in addition, the program eliminated the company’s need to buy a front-end solution such as PaperPort or Adobe Capture, he said. “ABBYY doesn’t claim to do that necessarily, but FineReader is, in fact, excellent front-end software, even if you don’t want to use the OCR features,” said Age. Additionally ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition supports many different fle formats for importing and saving. With its rich support for fle formats, this feature alone reduces the software a company must buy. “It saved us the money of buying a front-end program,” he said.

On the Horizon

Based on its success with ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition, DIAMP is actively pursuing franchise opportunities around the country. The terms of its newly-inked franchise business stipulate that each local franchise must use the winning combination of ABBYY FineReader Professional Edition and DIAMP’s range of services in order to satisfy the franchise requirement, said Age.
“My goal was to have a successful business utilizing the best hardware and software I could fnd and eventually franchise our business,” he said. ”As a franchisor, I have to tell my franchisees which hardware and software to buy. Every franchise I open up will have to buy from 5 to 15 copies of FineReader.

“ABBYY is an integral part of our business’ success,” Age continued. “I might not be in the same position if I hadn’t selected FineReader and ABBYY as one of the main software components of our business model. Most of all ABBYY FineReader is fexible, feature rich, stable and cost effective.”