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41
magazine
Scanners
Founded in 1923, The Football Pools
offers prizes of up to £3 million
through a variety of games, including
Treble Chance, Home-Draw-Away,
Premier 10 and Lotto.
Each week, it receives thousands of
paper coupons from customers, both
through the post and from door-to-door
collections. Coupons collected from
people’s homes on Thursday are taken to
one of 25 concession and satellite offices
on Friday, from where they used to be
physically transported to Liverpool for
processing on Saturday.
Conleth Byrne, managing director of
The Football Pools, said: “The logistics
involved in the collector route are both
expensive and hugely time critical, given
that we need to process coupons quickly,
declare a dividend to customers and pay
our winners.”
In order to speed up this process,
The Football Pools has installed desktop
KODAK Scan Station 520EX network
scanners in each of its concession
offices. Instead of driving the coupons to
Liverpool, operators now scan coupons in
batches, with the appropriate collector’s
reference and paperwork, and transmit the
images over an ADSL network to a server
located at head office. From start to finish,
the whole process takes just 30 minutes.
Images are stored locally on the Scan
Station’s 320 GB hard drive and saved to
a USB drive for back-up purposes.
KODAK Scan Station 520 EX network
scanners were chosen because they
do not have to be connected to a host
PC – they are both PC (with hard drive)
and scanner combined – and because
The Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary in Scotland is the
principal secondary care referral centre for the entire catchment
area of SouthWest Scotland. It offers all key services and has
almost 400 beds.
Three years ago, IT project manager Murray Glaister undertook a
project to digitise hospital patient records. This included the on-going
creation of new patient files for the main Acute Hospital, as well as the
on-demand conversion of files – some with several thousand pages –
for the Mental Health Unit within the Royal Crichton facility.
Following a tendering process, Glaister specified OPEX 2200
scanners featuring a state-of-the-art document feeder that enables a
single operator to scan direct from folders without upfront document
preparation.
Shaun Lee, OPEX EMEA operations director, said: “OPEX introduced
a revolution in scanning back in 2003 with our unique drop feed
technology. It proved to be a more efficient way to capture images of
real-world documents because it greatly reduces and, in many cases,
eliminates the doc-prep steps that often account for 70% of the cost
of the process. The DS 2200 extends this revolution into the world of
‘out of folder’ document capture.”
This capability,
combined with OPEX
‘CertainScan’ document
capture software and
embedded Kofax VRS technology, which automatically performs
content-based rotation, automatic colour detection, background
smoothing and image enhancement, speeds up the scanning process
and delivers high quality results.
Glaister is delighted with his choice. “The OPEX system is a serious
piece of kit and I liked and appreciated it from the beginning. To
maximise throughput we can have prep before scanning, but the single
prep scanner gives us notable flexibility,” he said.
Glaister originally ordered four DS2200 units split between the
main hospital and the mental health unit and has since added another
two units for the maternity hospital.
“We aim to scan some 500 files a week,” he said. “Multiple benefits
embrace rapid and accurate transmission of records to internal and
external locations without the time and travelling aspects of physical
delivery.We are also now taking on a number of smaller teams’ legacy
notes.”
A fast return
Setting the record straight
the 8-inch colour LCD touch screen
offers great ease of use for non-technical
users. A bespoke version of IDT Capture
from BCT provides four buttons for
pools, other games, accounts and
miscellaneous. Operators just select the
folder coupons should be scanned to.
Once images are checked, a heavily
customised version of ReadSoft Forms
applies various business rules to the data
before sending an output file containing
information, such as selections,
competition type, date of competition
and cost, to an in-house processing
system that processes the entry and
manages payments to customers.
Postal entries are scanned at head
office, using KODAK i780 production
scanners, and also integrated with the
ReadSoft Forms solution.
Neil Murphy, Kodak’s UK sales
manager, said: “The project is a super
example of how a distributed networked
scanning solution can truly pay
dividends for companies with multiple
geographically split sites. Coupon
processing used to be an intensive all
day, ten-hour operation for staff on a
Saturday. A huge amount of money and
time is now being saved.”
Savings in transport costs alone mean
that the investment will have paid for
itself within just six months.
kodakalaris.com/go/dinews
The Football Pools has slashed the time and cost of coupon
processing with KODAK Scan Station network scanners
Dumfries & Galloway NHS is using Opex DS2200 scanners to
speed up the digitisation of hospital patient notes
From start
to finish
the whole
process
takes just 30
minutes
