The Peruvian Penitentiary Infrastructure Office (Oficina de Infraestructura Penitenciaria, OIP) is a government entity responsible for maintaining and improving prison infrastructure in Peru. Their aim is to provide to persons in custody humane conditions for reintegration into society. OIP is authorized to carry out pre-investment research for publicly funded projects, to plan the budget for infrastructure projects and to conduct civil works for construction, repairs and maintenance of the penitentiary establishments. Having so many projects with a lot of responsibility on its shoulders, OIP has realized the need for a productive and continuously improving management model with state-of-the-art technologies and highly qualified staff.
Due to the modernization of the national infrastructure in Peru, all the administrative processes are going digital. OIP, with its ambitions of becoming the most modern public infrastructure entity in Latin America by 2021, could not remain uninvolved. For OIP the challenge was to optimize processing administrative documents, invoices and reports in English and Spanish in order to make them organized and easily accessible. Besides that, over the years the organization has accumulated a huge document archive which started to take up too much space in the office.
The office already had the necessary hardware — high production scanners that could be used for the task. However it lacked a software solution which would not only automate the process, but also allow integration with other organization's applications.
OIP organized a tender for the best solution, which was won by Arnebuk Perú, an IT vendor company and a certified partner of ABBYY, one of the leading OCR providers. Arnebuk Perú suggested ABBYY Recognition Server, a software solution for automated document capture and PDF conversion specifically designed for high-volume batch processing.
One of the main advantages of ABBYY Recognition Server is that it can be used for many different processes and workflows inside the organization, which perfectly corresponds to the client’s needs.
The first workflow happens in OIP´s administrative offices, where users operate MFPs to scan documents into the Hot Folder in the local network. ABBYY Recognition Server monitors this Hot Folder and sends the documents directly to recognition. The resulting searchable PDF files end up in the preconfigured output folder. Users do not even realize that they are using ABBYY Recognition Server as the entire workflow is completely automatic: there is no need for indexing in this process, and high recognition results allow skipping verification altogether.
Another workflow covers documentary procedures: technical records, invoices and other documents are processed and imported into OIP’s ECM system. Besides the papers for these day-to-day operations, OIP also had a huge central archive that they wanted digitized. Its documents have been scanned and exported to TIFF files for future reference. In both processes ABBYY Recognition Server has been used to index all the documents, detecting the type and other metadata in order to ensure that files can be easily located. The accuracy of recognition results demonstrated by ABBYY OCR was such that OIP decided to forgo additional verification.
Another requirement — that the OCR solution has to recognize documents in both English and Spanish — has been easily observed as ABBYY Recognition Server can work with 199 languages.
ABBYY Recognition Server has proved to be efficient, simple-to-use and suitable for different workflows. Currently about 2,000,000 documents are digitized per year, and around 200,000 images are processed with the OCR software. Taking the document volume into account, there is no doubt that the project could hardly have been implemented without the automation of the document flow.
OIP has found that digitized documents are much easier to arrange and locate when necessary and has begun using them in the BPM processes integrated into the institution system. Thus, the institution has been able to take its progressive approach to management a step further.
