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White PaperDow Jones & Company
Subscription Form Document Processing Improves Productivity and Customer Satisfaction Brian Gilmore of Dow Jones appreciates the flexibility and reliability of Datacap Taskmaster. | Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and other leading financial publications, has relied on imaging technologies for years to support its vast document management requirements. With hundreds of channels of distribution to manage multiple marketing campaigns going on simultaneously, the ability to track, capture and process incoming subscriptions and customer orders was challenging. |
Processing 8,000 Subscription Forms Daily
Subscriptions are the lifeblood of a publishing company. Dow Jones has several marketing departments, each of which distributes subscription forms to prospective customers. There are dozens of different formats and sizes with new ones being created all the time. For example, there are forms that are printed in magazines and newspapers, on cards that are slipped into magazines, and others that are used at educational institutions to sign up entire classes for The Wall Street Journal.
Don't miss Brian Gilmore of Dow Jones in a Live Webinar, January 23, 2007. Click here to register.
The company's Fulfillment Processing Center, located in Chicopee, Massachusetts, serves as the central headquarters for all incoming subscriptions. For years, they processed subscription cards manually, locating a unique document number, wherever it happens to be on the card, and entering it into their document management system.
With more than 8,000 subscription orders and marketing cards arriving daily, keeping pace with the data entry burden was a formidable challenge. To compound the problem, there was no standardization of the subscription card format. At any one time, subscriptions representing up to 50 different marketing campaigns could be arriving "live" in the mail.
The Operations Department in Chicopee determined that a new data capture solution was required to streamline customer orders and reduce the turnaround time on subscriptions. To help manage and facilitate its subscription fulfillment process, Dow Jones needed a data capture solution that would enable them to effectively capture critical customer data across a variety of forms. Dow Jones chose Datacap Taskmaster to automate its data entry. For Dow Jones, Taskmaster provides a unique new way to leverage OCR without building templates for each document to be captured. The solution uses OCR to identify the characters on a document, but adds another element - rules-based processing - to locate and validate the data. For Dow Jones, this was a critical element in ensuring that no information was missed or deleted.
Taskmaster's Rules-based Solution
Dow Jones' data capture system is deployed at the company's Fulfillment Processing Center in Chicopee, MA. Cards are fed into a Kodak scanner, with a Bowe Bell + Howell scanner as back-up for high-volume days (Monday, for example). Taskmaster applies a series of image enhancement functions - lines and speckles are removed, images are de-skewed - to prepare the image for recognition.
Taskmaster is a rules-based software system. Dow Jones uses both standard rules provided by Datacap, as well as custom rules developed to meet their own demanding requirements. Rules are used not only to validate data, but to drive all the background processing steps that create the original data, including form identification, field finding, recognition, and, of course, validation.
To handle the wide variety of forms that are received, Dow Jones leverages the Taskmaster "fingerprint" matching feature. When a subscription card is scanned, the data capture system uses advanced pattern-matching rules to determine if the postcard's layout, or "fingerprint," is similar to any previously received cards. If it matches a document in the Taskmaster library, then rules for locating and validating data are triggered. If no match is made, then the fingerprint is provisionally added to the library, pending operator review. The advantage of this approach is Dow Jones can "train" the system to automatically apply rule sets to specific documents, yet no tedious setup is required for new or unusual formats.
Once identified, rules are invoked to perform recognition using the Scansoft or OCE RecoStar engines. The intermediate recognition results are then searched for a unique document number, which encodes key subscriber information. Finally, a "rule set" is run to automatically pre-validate data before it is shown to verification operators.
Although a significant percentage of the cards are processed with no user intervention, some require verification by a user. Using Datacap's single-pass, modeless data entry interface, operators can fix low-confidence recognition, review fields that have failed the pre-validation rules, or key from image forms that have not be recognized accurately. When verification is complete, the images are handed back to the Taskmaster RuleRunner for export formatting.
Since Taskmaster rules are written in Microsoft VB Script, they are easy to modify. Dow Jones has used .NET to extend the standard Taskmaster rules to provide customer-specific processing features. For example, rules are used on multi-subscriber forms to create unique entries in FileNet for every subscriber on the page.
Results
Since implementing Taskmaster, Dow Jones has reduced the turnaround time for subscriptions from 48 hours to less than a day, while at the same time Dow Jones has reallocated five full-time employees in data entry and I.T., previously dedicated to subscription processing to new responsibilities. Dow Jones also realized a much tighter integration between data entry, fulfillment and their FileNet document management system. And not surprisingly, with faster turnaround, customer inquiries about when the publication will arrive have been eliminated.
"We turned to Datacap to help us reduce the time spent on data entry," said Brian Gilmore, National Manager of Circulation Service Operations for Dow Jones Fulfillment Services. "We needed a data capture solution that was flexible and reliable, one that would easily handle mixed batches of highly-varied documents. Datacap Taskmaster enables us to scan and capture critical customer information and quickly process our subscription orders. By improving our reporting turnaround time, marketing decisions are now made in a more timely manner."