The expanding scope of records management

So now Message Architects includes the Cloudview software with its own technology in a bundled application. And customers have shown their approval by driving up Message Architects’ sales by more than 300 percent in the last two years, Chamberland says.

Intelligent format recognition

Helping other firms with their records management needs is one of the services that Le Groupe A&A offers. But to maximize the business, the company needs to control its expenses, says Michel Laurin, co-owner.

A major expense of the business is the personnel needed to scan and index the 8,000 to 10,000 documents it receives daily. The imaging solution that LeGroupe was using required four to five people each day to man it, was difficult for new personnel to learn and had high error rates.

Laurin says, "In this business, you always need to look to improve the business process."

Several solutions on the market potentially promised more efficiency than LeGroup’s legacy system. But many were still too slow, difficult to learn or had other drawbacks. Laurin knew one of the executives from Artsyl Technologies from a previous business relationship. Artsyl’s SimpleCapture Pro technology was much faster and easier to learn than the other products, according to Laurin.

The technology does more than just scan the image. The optical character recognition engine can convert scanned information from one format to another. That is particularly useful in scanning invoices, which have critical information like customer name, address, product sold, payment information and other details in several different areas, depending on the invoice format, according to Laurin.

LeGroupe designs a template to scan, read and export the invoice information into the desired format for a client’s accounting system. Other scanning/OCR technologies that Laurin tested required different templates for different types of invoices, meaning they were very labor-intensive.

With the other solutions and with LeGroupe’s legacy technology, it took 30 minutes to design a template for each different type of invoice. SimpleCapture Pro has better intelligence that the other products, so one template can handle all but 1 percent of invoices, Laurin says.
By being more efficient with scanning and exporting of invoices, LeGroupe has been able to expand that part of its business more than 90 percent, according to Laurin.