The Conversion Workflow
IMC has mastered all aspects of conversion, from document preparation to providing instant access to archived documents.
- Document preparation may involve numerous activities, depending on the media to be scanned or imported and the customer's service level agreement. For instance, our staff may have to remove staples from documents, unfold dog-eared corners, and insert batch separators for high-volume paper document processing. Preparation of other media might include special handling of large-format continuous form green bar reports or rolls of film or sealing fragile documents so they are not damaged when scanned.
- IMC uses industry-leading Kofax capture software and its own WSSRD capture/reporting software and high-speed, best-of-breed paper and film scanners for high-volume, production document scanning. We can also scan one document at a time using conventional scanners when, for instance, we process books or one-of-a-kind documents.
- If customers are converting electronic media such as magnetic tape, DASD, CD, VHS tape, etc, IMC obviously loads the media instead of scanning it and performs the rest of the conversion workflow, including data format conversion, as usual.
- IMC performs custom indexing by filling in index fields. Indexing can be as simple as assigning document ID numbers in one field or as complex as assigning multiple criteria like who created the document, creation date, document type, department, etc. in multiple fields. Simple indexing can be done automatically while more complex indexing requires manual data entry of as many indexing criteria as the customer requires. Also, the same document can be indexed in different ways for different batches of documents put to different uses by, say, different departments in the same organization. The result of custom indexing is a fairly rigid database of documents organized by a unique taxonomy that best addresses a customer's retrieval requirements.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) automatically recognizes the characters that comprise the contents of original paper documents and duplicates them in electronic form as the contents of digital documents. Even the best OCR technology isn't perfect, so manual or automatic error correction is needed to fix misrecognized characters. IMC uses Prime Recognition OCR software which employs multiple best-of-breed OCR engines to recognize characters and then "vote" as to the most plausible of possible character alternatives so as to achieve very high accuracy rates before error correction. Unlike custom indexing, OCR allows for full-text searching on the electronic archive.
- The result of indexing and OCR is the index criteria — meta data — used to manage documents. IMC can retain the customer's archive with meta data or retain just the archive or the meta data separately, depending on how much storage space the customer has or how much control over retrieval it wants. We can also import indexes from existing databases to reduce custom indexing work.
- Quality Control (QC) involves all activities performed on the recognized data such as rotating, deskewing, cropping and despeckling pages either automatically or manually via the capture software. IMC uses Kofax Ascent for much of its production scanning which offers Virtual Rescanning technology that performs activities like automatically eliminating blank pages to expedite QC, though IMC can also perform manual QC on every scanned page to meet more stringent SLAs.
- Some customers apply bar codes to documents to identify and index or route them through a physical or electronic workflow. IMC can accelerate capture by automatically recognizing either indexing data on barcodes to enter it into the archive index or routing data with barcodes to appropriately guide documents through the QC process. We can also apply bar codes to customer documents to achieve similar goals.
- Most customers archive their documents as TIFF images or JPEG or PDF documents. IMC can create the archive to be accessible on the customer's premises via custom, best-of-breed or customers' legacy applications. If customers opt to store the archive at IMC, we can enable remote access to it via our own storage-and-retrieval software over broadband networks.