Imaging Solution Gets Postal Union's Vote

Integrator Bob Blum, owner of Computer Synthesis, Inc. (Norcross, GA) makes a living designing document and image capture and retrieval applications for projects that, in his words, no one else wants. "I'm a niche player," says Blum. "My customers want to be automated and tend to have very specific needs. Often, that involves projects where the number of seats is too small or the application too custom for many other integrators." It was this willingness to take on a challenge that helped him land a very demanding customer, the American Postal Workers Union (APWU).

Every three years, APWU holds national elections. Merkle Direct Marketing, Inc. (Lanham, MD), the service bureau that had been processing the ballots by hand for 33 years, had never been able to complete the job in fewer than 15 days, requiring several more days to certify the results. Meanwhile, union officials and candidates spent many tense hours waiting. Having worked with Blum in the past, Merkle asked if he could meet APWU's requirements: process 100,000 forms for 47 ballots with as many as 22 different races with absolutely no errors while insuring no fraud was committed.

APWU allowed Blum to redesign the ballots to better support template-based form identification. Each form has a unique keyword, which allows the system to recognize it and process it appropriately. Union members mailed the ballots to designated post office boxes, eliminating much of the presorting. On the first day of the process, the sealed envelopes were brought to a Ramada Inn in Hagerstown, MD. Code numbers on the outside of the envelopes were manually entered into computers by 10 data entry workers and compared against the union's database of 225,000 members to insure that there were no invalid or duplicated votes. Within six hours a report was produced and audited.

The envelopes were then taken to a caging area where they were machine-opened and the ballots were disassociated from any identifying information. Each ballot was visually reviewed for validity and to look for any obvious problems that could result in an exception/inaccuracy such as erasures or double votes. The ballots were scanned using Fujitsu's 4790 and 5740 models, which were drop-shipped to the temporary location by distributor NewWave Technologies. Mutilated ballots were scanned using a Fujitsu flatbed scanner.

Blum used Doctus 3.2 from Mitek Systems (San Diego) as a basic platform on which to build the solution. Doctus provided the document capture and forms processing capability to complement the custom application Blum created to meet the unique requirements and set processing rules. Data was stored in an Oracle database. Crystal Reports from Seagate Software was used to generate progress reports which were posted at the site and on the Web in HTML format every half hour.

The Accuracy Of Automated Document Processing Is Put To The Test
Concurrent to the automated processing, a three- or four-person election committee audited the results and did spot checks, recounting certain races to ensure complete accuracy. In 50% of the cases where an error was found, the auditors made them. Blum wrote a utility to manually resolve inaccuracies. Instead of three weeks, the election results were tabulated and verified in five days.

Blum's nine-year relationship with Merkle gave him the opportunity to prove he could provide a solution, but overcoming APWU's objections wasn't an easy job. Blum conducted numerous proof of concept demonstrations to union officials during a nine-month period. A full-scale mock-up of the solution was also assembled in Atlanta.

Though providing the solution for this election was a one-time contract, Blum is considering offering similar solutions to other organizations that conduct similar elections. This type of solution is also applicable for other businesses with higher than normal accuracy requirements. According to Blum, "APWU is a worst case scenario," but another target industry is non-profit organizations, which receive irregular payments of unpredictable amounts that can't be verified against a database. While most of the business world may be able to live with a 2% to 4% accuracy rate, Computer Synthesis caters to businesses with higher standards.