Kofax Information Capture Technology Speeds Access To Traffic Collision Reports And Improves Highway Safety
Kofax, the world's largest information capture vendor, today announced the successful integration of its Ascent Capture and VirtualReScan (VRS) technology for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). As part of a competitive bid process, WSDOT incorporated Kofax technology into the agency's new collision records system. The company's industry-leading information capture platform and VRS is being used by WSDOT to speed the processing of thousands of multi-page traffic collision reports that are generated by law enforcement agencies throughout the state each year, as well as to help WSDOT effectively analyze and measure local traffic safety issues.
Kofax Ascent Capture and VRS were integrated with WSDOT's collision records system to improve the quality and accuracy of captured images that the State's collision analysis teams use to make decisions about safety upgrades on local roadways and state highways. Each month, WSDOT is required to feed statistical information about traffic collisions to their counties and cities to help them develop strategies to improve traffic safety.
In addition, collision reports are considered public information and are accessed frequently in insurance claims, making the quick processing of each report critical for WSDOT, as well as the Washington State Patrol. With Ascent Capture and VRS, the quality of captured images has been significantly improved, and manual data processing time has been reduced to the point that collision reports are typically ready for public disclosure within 48 hours of receipt.
"By integrating a flexible information capture system to streamline its collision reporting workflow and analysis procedures, WSDOT can now provide more efficient service to the public, while outfitting local officials with critical traffic safety information they use in the effort to save lives," said Anthony Macciola, vice president of development and marketing at Kofax. "We are seeing more and more state and federal agencies such as WSDOT adopt information capture to cope with the mountains of paper and unstructured data that they receive, increase operational efficiency, and grow their level of service to the public."
The WSDOT typically receives thousands of accident-related forms each month, in varying states of condition, that must be analyzed accurately and quickly enough to provide both the public and local communities with the information they need to make informed decisions about traffic safety. Kofax's information capture technology provided the WSDOT analysts with exceptional images without the need to rescan, was advanced enough to handle difficult-to-process documents coming in from the field that -- for example -- could be torn or rain-smeared, and ultimately represented a clear return on their investment.
As traffic collisions typically entail a variety of factors, including different vehicle types, sequences of events and accident location, WSDOT must maintain strict records on each collision for insurance and legal disclosure. To help implement a versatile information capture system capable of processing such information, WSDOT initiated a competitive bid process and chose Olympia-based systems integration firm ImageSource, a Kofax Certified Solution Provider (CSP) and nationally recognized provider of document, content and information management systems. ImageSource chose to implement Ascent Capture and VRS, along with a Bell+Howell 8000 series scanner, based on their capability to validate the integrity of keyed data and ensure that each disparate piece of data is relayed correctly into WSDOT's collision-reporting system.
"Implementing a robust information capture system was key for the WSDOT installation, due to the incredible amount of logic and detail that needed to be captured from each collision report," said Shadrach White, CTO of ImageSource. "The indexing and validation capabilities of the Ascent platform and VRS enhanced accuracy and seamlessly integrated into WSDOT's collision records system, and improved the overall efficiency of their operations."
As a result of the implementation, WSDOT has been able to reassign staff resources into other areas, eliminate a large amount of physical storage space used to house hard copies of collision reports and improve its daily processing productivity levels.
About Washington State Department of Transportation
The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is responsible for maintaining 7,000 miles of highways and 3,300 bridges and tunnels, including the longest and widest of the world's first floating bridges. WSDOT also operates the state's most popular tourist attraction – the Washington State Ferries – with 28 boats that carry more than 26 million passengers annually. WSDOT is also a partner with Amtrak in providing the Amtrak Cascades passenger rail service connecting Seattle and other western Washington cities in the Vancouver B.C./Portland, Oregon corridor. With local transit agencies it helps provide bus and other transit services. The seven-member Washington State Transportation Commission is the department's governing board. WSDOT also runs freight railroad cars that carry grain in Eastern Washington and operates 16 emergency airfields. For further information on WSDOT, please visit www.wsdot.wa.gov.
About ImageSource
ImageSource, Inc. is an industry-leading provider of professional computer solutions and integration services, with a specific focus on front-end document capture and back-end information/content management applications. Established in 1995, ImageSource, Inc. is a privately held company with corporate headquarters in Olympia, WA and multi-site offices in Seattle, WA, San Jose, CA and Escondido, CA . For additional information, please visit www.imagesourceinc.com.
About Kofax
Kofax, a division of DICOM Group plc (LSE: DCM.L), is the world's leading provider of information capture solutions, according to research by Strategy Partners. Kofax products accelerate business processes and reduce their cost by collecting paper documents, forms and e-documents from throughout organizations, transforming them into retrievable information, and delivering it all into line-of-business applications, databases and archives. The company's Ascent platform is the most popular information capture application worldwide, and its VRS (VirtualReScan) is the de facto standard for scanning productivity. Kofax products are widely used in finance, government, insurance, healthcare, and a broad range of companies and agencies that must capture critical business information from paper and electronic documents and forms.