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DATA CAPTURE
When your core business is
information, the way that this
content is collected, stored,
managed and accessed is
paramount to the quality,
responsiveness and cost of the
service provided to clients. At
Wilmington plc, intelligent digital
management of content is a
strategic priority.
Wilmington plc is a network of
companies that delivers knowledge,
expertise and tools to help
businesses gain competitive edge in
the digital age. Founded in 1995, it
specialises in four areas: Finance,
Legal, Risk & Compliance and
Insight.
As part of its offering, Wilmington
Insight provides the charitable sector
with analysis of technical, financial
and marketing data relating to
160,000 UK charities, 1.5 million UK
charity supporters and all charitable
legacies within the UK, worth over
£12bn in 2014 – information that
charities use to drive their own
legacy administration and marketing
programmes.
Intelligent content management
Over the last decade, Wilmington
Insight has worked with EASY
Software to implement highly
efficient and intelligent digital
content management solutions.
The relationship began in 2005,
with a move to improve back-office
efficiency at a group level, through
the scanning and storage of financial
documentation relating to purchases,
and integration with internal resource
planning systems. More recently,
Wilmington Insight has applied digital
automation to the way it handles
high volumes of documents for a
specialist data service aimed at
charities.
The service receives printed
documents from external third parties
– in volumes of around 5,000 each
week – from which it extracts and
processes key information that it sells
on to charity clients in database form.
Before automating data
extraction, staff in London would
have to leaf through pages and
pages of documents to find the data
they needed, then courier the files to
another building where they would be
written into the database by teams
of copy typists. The quality and
format of the incoming documents
varied greatly, adding to the time it
took to identify the data needed for
extraction.
“We had to collate both contact
and financial data manually, and
there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing,”
says Polly Avgherinos, managing
director of Wilmington Business
Intelligence. “To type up one set of
information took one person a whole
week.”
This was a laborious, mundane
exercise given the high volume of
content involved. The job couldn’t be
rushed either: charities pay to have
access to the data which they use in
vital income generation work, so the
accuracy of the data is critical.
In addition to improving efficiency
and data reliability, Wilmington
Insight had competitive reasons to
improve its processes. “Although no
one else offers the service that we
do, the market is demanding more
information from the source material
we handle,” Polly explains. “As long
as we were restricted to manual
processes, we couldn’t hope to
meet these additional needs without
employing more people. But charities
have finite resources, and couldn’t
have tolerated the higher prices we
would have to have charged.”
Joining the digital dots
Based on Wilmington’s positive
experience of working with EASY
Software, the Insight organisation
approached the document
management specialist to see if
there was an affordable technology
solution it could implement to
automate and accelerate data
capture and management processes.
EASY engaged technology
partners Abbyy and Fujitsu. Abbyy,
which specialises in optical character
recognition, document capture
and language software, provided
its Flexicapture data capture and
document processing solution. This
‘reads’, deciphers and intelligently
picks out key information from
scans of incoming paper documents
captured on Fujitsu scanners.
“The combination of technology
EASY recommended has proved a
great fit and really captured what we
needed,” Polly says.
To increase accuracy and
efficiency, EASY and Abbyy established
four different templates to cater for
common differences in the way source
data is submitted. Scanned images
and extracted data are sent through
EASY’s own EASY Documents workflow
solution. This prompts final checking
and correction of any inaccurate data
and adds the ability to quickly and
easily search and retrieve content.
Once verified, the data is sent via XML
to Wilmington’s database.
Maintaining business advantage
“From having an old-fashioned,
manual process, our situation has
been completely revolutionised,”
explains Polly. “It now takes the same
person just one and a half days to
process a workload that took an
entire week previously. It means we
can handle greater volumes of data
with fewer people, and deliver the
extra information our clients crave.
“We’ve increased the data
populations for all of the documents
we get in, which means we can
put more data products out there,
making us even more competitive.
We were already unique in what
we do, but now we’ve further
sharpened our edge, maintaining our
advantage.”
Wilmington Insight has cut the time it takes to capture and process data by more
than two-thirds, from 5 days to just one and half.
Effortless extractions
Continued...
Before
automating
data
extraction,
staff in
London
would have
to leaf
through
pages and
pages of
documents
