Jerry Miller, Spectrum's Director of Operations, talks about the importance of process control when managing millions of pages of documents every month and dozens of projects at any one time.
Process Control begins with a clear definition of the task at hand and the key is to make certain that each workflow stage is reduced to its lowest common denominator. A laser focused approach provides the best results for the client.
Organization and design prior to moving projects to production is crucial. In addition to process, having highly trained and motivated staff is critical to the success of any project. We take this a step further and make sure that each individual project always has a project leader. We are never on auto-pilot and our lead staff must constantly inspect/audit results and monitor staff performance.
Pre-Requisite:
Ø A clear handoff from Sales to Operation
o What is the deliverable?
o How is the input structured?
o Is there a clear and objective method to facilitate document separation and a means to index each document?
o What is the delivery method?
o Box Review/Client kickoff
o Testing and acceptance of proof of concept
Ø Well trained staff to apply conscientious labor to a task driven / results oriented process
Testing/Acceptance and move to Production:
Ø We utilize an electronic tracking system to provide an audit trail for chain of custody with an analogue work order for backup and auditing.
Ø Each box is assigned a unique tracking number.
Ø The client box number is captured.
Ø Each box is broken down to smaller batches which are also logged into our tracking system.
Ø Batch control feeds a controlled process.
Ø Each project has a unique capture workflow designed from document preparation to release.
Ø Customer data is utilized whenever possible to automate indexing and for auditing purposes.
Ø Document separation methodology is employed to ensure files are separated correctly.
Ø Indexing methodology may be automated by the use of OCR and/or barcode logic.
Ø Each project will be refined to best practices for each capture workflow stage: Prep, Scan, QC, Validation, Verification.
Ø Prep
o This step helps ensure documents are in good condition and can be auto-fed through the scanner for optimum productivity. Good prep improves image quality, protects documents, and ensures that the scanner operator can be as efficient as possible.
o Insertion of document separator sheets, if necessary.
o Identification of document types, if necessary.
Ø Scanner
o Ensure that all information is completely captured.
o Some QC occurs at the scanner, major issues detected and addressed.
o Recognition that document separation is occurring.
Ø QC
o Quality control can be customized to customer expectation level
o During QC the results from the scanning process are checked to ensure complete capture, image quality, and document separation. Image quality is subjective so QC is performed by senior staff. QC is the stage where our level of confidence in our process is validated.
Ø Validation
o This is where indexing occurs. Good QC ensures that document separation is accurate. With documents accounted for we now use data entry to key in at least a trigger field.
o Where is the key field? This determines the degree of difficulty. A good process ensures that the task is kept simple relative to the objective of keying in a value. We may have done something at prep to facilitate data entry or the client documents are often structured in a way that simplifies the indexing process
o Accuracy of the output is dependent on applying an accurate index on every single document processed. We utilize a number of strategies including field validation, reviewing any auto-generated index values against the document, normalizing data output, auditing against existing customer data, and more.
Ø Verification
o Workflow stage responsible for adding a double check to indexing by either double checking or going to the extreme: double blind key with a different team member.
Finally we make sure all output processing has been completed accurately and an accounting of work performed is provided to the client. By leveraging a set of custom reports we are able to account for every document processed from every box, including batch stats, document indexing components captured, and keystroke totals. Our tracking system provides reports that can be audited back to both the analogue work order and our release database. This ensures a complete audit trail for every step of our process.
