New clients fill out the registration cards by hand and send them in by post. The registration cards are scanned in using the Bulk Scan application provided with Danwood EDM and OCR is performed on the cards to pick up the handwriting and populate the relevant index fields for the document type. Various document types are used, so there are a number of templates used at the scanning stage.

Documents can be retrieved by users through a simple web based interface. When retrieved, the image is displayed on screen with the indexing information associated with it and any notes that may have been added to the document, providing a full history of the document and any queries there may have been with it.

ESL worked closely with this company to bring in existing data from non-scanned registration cards (approx 140,000), so that these could be scanned over time and then associated with the existing indexing information – the native format was MS Access and a routine was written to convert these indexes to Danwood EDM format. The legacy documents are being scanned to ensure that all registration cards ever received are held on the same system and can be retrieved in the same way.

ESL undertook a considerable amount of customisation for this system, which has an unusual indexing requirement due to the diverse nature of the different registration cards in use, their associated products and the changeable lifecycles of the products once they are bought.