United Nations World Food Program Streamlines Its Monitoring Activities with ABBYY FormReader™

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United Nations World Food Program Streamlines Its Monitoring Activities with ABBYY FormReader™

ABBYY’s Data Capture Solution Helps to Analyze Performance of the “Mid-Day Meal Programme” Project Initiated by the Government of India.

The UNWFP, India, has been the largest multilateral conduit for external food assistance to the country since 1963. Among its many operations, it is presently in the process of evaluating the “Mid-Day Meal Programme” (initiated by the Government of India in 1995) to give a boost to universalize primary education by increasing school enrollment, retention, and attendance and simultaneously impacting on nutrition of students in primary classes.

Challenges

As a part of the monitoring and evaluation stages the UNWFP had a few sets of forms for each of its activities which had to be manually filled up at the village level (Form A) and passed to the higher authority at the block level, where it was aggregated (Form B) and finally to the district level, where the Forms B were again aggregated (Form C). The process was not only time consuming but also led to various errors and complications while processing.

Solution

NETSPIDER INDIA (NIIL), ABBYY’s partner in India, proposed to create machine-readable forms and process them with ABBYY FormReader 6.5 Desktop Edition.

Process

Under the pilot project, machine-readable forms were prepared by using the ABBYY FormDesignerTM, tool for creating structured forms. The forms are filled up and collected at the project site, then sent to the district HQs where they are scanned and recorded onto CDs. After that, they are sent to the state HQ where they are processed by ABBYY FormReader 6.5 Desktop Edition and uploaded to the custom-designed Web portal which is accessible only to designated users.

Objectives of the pilot project - to streamline and automate the reporting system, to better analyze the Program performance and to develop and maintain a Web portal - were successfully fulfilled with the help of ABBYY’s data capture solution. The major challenge of this project was that almost 90% of forms contained numeric data, with a lot of decimals. Since the project has taken off, all the problems caused by poor recognition quality and inability to capture data are now long gone.

Conclusion

The use of ABBYY FormReader 6.5 Desktop Edition has been recognized as an efficient solution and the UNWFP has installed ABBYY FlexiCapture 8.0, a new generation of the ABBYY’s data capture solutions at six other project sites in addition to the four already existing ones. Thus, the NETSPIDER INDIA’s support and ABBYY’s revolutionary technologies help make that wonderful undertaking by the UNWFP successful.

About the United Nations World Food Program (UNWFP)
The UNWFP is the United Nations front-line agency in the fight against global hunger. The operations range from saving lives in emergencies, improving nutrition and quality of life of the world’s most vulnerable people to enabling development by making people more self-reliant. For more information, please visit www.wfp.org/english/

About NETSPIDER INDIA (NIIL)
NETSPIDER INDIA specializes in ABBYY channel distribution and giving end-to-end solutions in various fields like imaging, networking, scanning, connectivity, project consultancy, and doing developments around ABBYY technology. NETSPIDER INDIA has experienced technical skills in implementing ABBYY FineReader OCR, FormReader Enterprise, Desktop, FlexiCapture Studio and other ABBYY products. More details are available athttp://www.niil.in/