Systems Integrator Wins Capture Project For Boy Scouts
This company designed a custom data capture solution that is being implemented by Boy Scout Councils all over the country.
On his honor, to do his best, Bill Houser set out to provide the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) with a fax solution to handle the crush of paperwork processed by the BSA Council in Charlotte, NC. Little did he know that the fruits of his labor would turn out to be a nationally adopted document capture solution for the entire BSA organization.
Houser is the manager of strategic alliances for DTI Integrated Business Solutions, Inc. DTI is a document imaging integrator that specializes in image and record management, workflow solutions, and document capture solutions. Custom programming is a key differentiator for DTI. “Our ability to utilize vendors’ SDKs (software developer’s kits) and custom programming really adds value to our imaging solutions,” says Houser.
That custom programming value landed DTI at the BSA. The BSA local councils process more than a million applications on paper each year. During peak recruiting times, some local councils process more than 26,000 documents per day. All of those documents were entered manually into the BSA’s Oracle database. “We started by integrating a content management workflow solution for them in Charlotte about six years ago,” explains Houser. “Since then, the relationship has continued to develop as a result of several more workflow projects with the BSA. The more we worked with them, the more interest they had in extending the imaging technology into other parts of the organization.”
About two years ago, Houser launched a pilot project to further simplify the data collection process. The idea was to keep the existing BSA paper forms and use the organization’s existing fax machines at each council location to automate the capture of the data from the paper documents. “The problems were many,” says Houser. “The BSA forms were not designed for data capture, and the quality of the forms was not high enough to give us accurate results.” Although the pilot project failed, it did give Houser some real-world test results to use in planning a better solution. Much of that testing was done on a volunteer basis by DTI.
Build Distributed Scanning Solutions
It was then that Houser attended a Kofax Partner Conference. “There was
a breakout session called Zero Footprint Scanning,” he says. “I was
first in line for that session. It turns out that the Kofax solution
was exactly what we needed for the BSA.” The solution that Houser
assembled for the BSA consisted of a Kofax Document Scan Server, a
Fujitsu 5120 scanner, Ascent Capture software from Kofax, the BSA’s
Oracle application, and a Web-based front end created by DTI. The
Document Scan Server connects to any point on the local network, and
the Fujitsu scanner connects directly to the Scan Server. No PC is
needed for the scanning station. The BSA accesses the Web-based
application from any PC connected to the Web. Each council scans the
applications, and the data is automatically transferred to the main
database at the BSA headquarters in Dallas. No data is stored locally
at the councils; it is all located at the headquarters.
Each council is responsible for purchasing its scanning package. Each package costs approximately $1,800. The installation at each council takes only minutes and can be performed by a nontechnical person. Houser expects 200 of the 307 total councils to eventually adopt the system. More than 100 have the Kofax solution in place now. DTI continues to add sales each time a council purchases a scanning package.
Houser says that DTI expects to finish 2006 with a 20% growth rate — partially due to thinking creatively when it comes to document capture solutions. “We are using the new technology in document capture to take a different approach on how we deliver our solutions,” says Houser. “We apply much more effort to the discovery process, and we perform due diligence before we will recommend a front end capture solution.”