FormsPro at Fingerhut Corporation
What was the
process prior to the implementation ?
Fingerhut Corporation, at their
data processing center in St. Cloud, Minnesota receives
approximately 150,000 pieces of mail per day (mainly order
cards). These cards were processed (data captured) using a
variety of imaging systems from IBM and ScanOptics. All orders
were microfilmed before being shredded. Images that failed
complete recognition were sent off shore for keying. Customer
service had to request copies of orders from microfilm, which
could take days to resolve customer service issues.
Fingerhut’s marketing department made frequent changes to
Form layout, to add a new template for capture in the existing
systems it took anything from 2-5 days and need a computer
programmer. Also, since the process involved solutions from
multiple vendors, its’ maintenance was difficult.
General
description of the content, document and/or process management
technology used to solve a critical business requirement.
Oyster Software, Inc. customized their
FormsPro product for Fingerhut to meet the requirements
fulfilled by all of the existing systems, while providing some
very valuable new features. The new solution provided
Fingerhut an integrated enterprise wide solution that was to
be used by all departments including data processing and
customer service.
The Form Design tool that was already a
drag-n-drop process was further refined to make it easier to
draw order tables, sharing common keying templates across
multiple forms, allowing for business rules to be added and
shared across multiple fields and forms. The Copy and Save-as
functions of the form design tool allowed the creation of new
templates for automated forms processing within minutes (while
existing systems took days), which in turn allowed a much
larger percentage of documents to be scanned for recognition
and/or keying from image.
Since Fingerhut has hundreds of different
order templates active at the same time and new forms were
introduced faster than they could be defined in the system, an
innovative concept of IFR (intelligent form recognition) was
introduced for them. After an analysis of all documents 5
major groups of documents were identified, while these
documents had the same basic field groups that needed
recognition, their location on the documents varied from form
to form. An I-Form template allowed the user to define fields
on a form and designate them as floating fields. This
designation made the recognition process segment the image and
using data attributes identify the location of the field in
question on the form after which normal recognition could
proceed just like for a normal form. The combination of
certain field types identified a forms as the right one out of
a choice of 5 e.g. a combination of field type A + field type
B makes I-Form 1, while field type A + field type C makes it
I-Form 2. This process greatly reduced the need for continues
form design for capture could handle changes in forms
templates without user intervention.
Snippet keying, an application that
groups and presents together all like fields e.g. phone
numbers from all documents that failed recognition or
validation, Keying rates of over 16,000 keystrokes an hour
have been recorded at Fingerhut using the highly optimized
screens of Snippet keying.
All order cards processed by FormsPro
were also indexed and archived for retrieval by the system.
With FormsPro a customer service representative could retrieve
from Archive, the original images of the order cards using a
customer number or an order number.
The system was designed to be completely
modular, allowing for easy addition and removal of machines
and users to the system for handling peak volumes, if and when
required.
What benefits
were derived from implementing the nominated solution (i.e. IT
benefits, cost/resource savings, increased corporate
adaptability, etc.)?
Snippet
keying allowed Fingerhut to reduce the cost of keying in-house
to levels that made off shore keying more expensive and they
stopped sending work over seas. Since the keying from image
systems support very high keying rates the data entry staff
was very happy since they are paid by total keystrokes. The
system also allowed supervisors to review detailed operator
performance records so that they could monitor quality and
performance.
The
ability of customer service representatives to be able to pull
up images of orders online allowed Fingerhut to meet their
“Tier One Customer Service Initiative”, which called for
handling majority of customer telephone inquiries on the first
call. This eliminated the need for manual paper or microfilm
retrieval. Immediate response to the customer also resulted in
a happier customer and eliminated the need for a call back,
reducing telephony and/or mailing charges.
How does this
solution provide a competitive advantage for the organization?
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