Keir Starmer QC has said that the criminal justice system needs to move away from paper-based systems and transform the way criminal cases are handled. By April 2012, information will be passed digitally from the police to the CPS and sent over secure email to the defence.

The CPS is already moving forward using technology to prosecute. For example; the early guilty plea pilot in Liverpool, in which files are presented digitally; Winchester Crown court, where evidence is presented on laptops in court; and Dyfed Powys, where advanced information is served electronically. (http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/cps-go-paperless-april-says-starmer)

Alex Marshall, Chief Constable of Hampshire Police also highlighted that courts becoming paperless would save police time, as Police Officers could take evidence electronically using iPads or Blackberrys and those files could be sent straight to the court.

An Inquest, at Winchester Crown Court is currently relying on a photocopy with some pages missing. The inquest heard the document was given to the Independent Police Complaints Commission on the day of the crime, but the police watchdog has been unable to find it.

This substantial change in methods is going to involve considerable process change in the submission of evidence; from hand written statements, forms, emails, word processed documents, photographic evidence and police incident notes. However the benefits easily out-weigh the cost of change.

Where documents were previously photocopied many times for the distribution and sharing of evidence and case notes, this will be replaced by converting paper files – e.g. written and signed statements- to image. Similarly the addition of native files such as MS Word documents, XML based electronic forms and photographs and videos (in many formats) all need to be captured and stored.

But conversion is not enough, since each item has to be suitably and accurately classified and identified and easily retrievable in court. Not only does the Judge, Defence and Prosecution need to be able to find, view and identify key documents and phrases, but the jurors may also need to simultaneously be able to access the same information. So this requires new ways to present evidence and reports for analysis and assessment.

Furthermore, it may be necessary to ‘flag’ key documents for the jury to assess in their deliberations. But, on the contrary, there is no physical limit to the amount of information that can be accessed by both parties.

So, there is much to consider in this desire to migrate to digital working. All the above is deliverable with suitable process analysis and change management. This is already happening in the USA using our premier product OnBase – http://www.hyland.com/news/newsitemdetails/11-11-01/cobb_county_georgia_chooses_onbase.aspx. Here digitally collected evidence is directly up loaded to the case files.

This is the core business of ProcessFlows, where we continually take paper out of processes, making them far more efficient at the same time.

For more information please contact us on 01962 835053 or email enquiries@processflows.co.uk

The Justice Select Committee points out that it would not be acceptable in a school if teachers only spent 25% of their time teaching.

So why is the Probation Service wasting all this time?

The problem appears to be with the National Offender Management Service (NOMS).  NOMS was set up with the good intention of balancing the needs of prisoners with the resources of the correctional services.

Implementing an ‘end-to-end management’ process for each offender, as specified by NOMS, so that an individuals’ progress is traceable from their first contact with the correctional services to full completion of the sentence, should have improved efficiency.

Instead, it has created piles of ‘paperwork’ which has actually made the process it was designed to improve worse!   But this inefficiency is not confined to the Probation Service, since we hear that the Police are similarly bogged down and no doubt other services are suffering too.

With today’s technology the use of physical paper should be the exception as opposed to the rule

Look at how many electronic transactions and activities we perform today as consumers, with virtually no paper in sight – apart from the obligatory boarding card in some cases!

It is easy to capture information electronically at source

By removing the paper, or by converting it into electronic format, it can be more easily analysed and moved throughout the organisation.  For the Probation Service, this saves officer time, freeing them up to focus more on what they should and want to be doing; working closely with released prisoners to re-establish them in the community.

The end-to-end management process set up to match prisoner needs with correctional resources is retained, but documents are now easy to find from the desktop and workflow can be added to automatically route the ‘paperwork’ throughout the organisation and to the correct person at every stage of the process.

Improving process flows so you can save time is what we do

Click one of the buttons on the right to get in touch or visit the case study section of our website.

Then think about the amount of time it takes you to deal with them.

How many people spend all their time just processing forms, which could be anything from a short application for a magazine subscription to a multiple paged Census form, insurance claim, loan or ISA applications?

Forms are not industry specific and they all have one thing in common ….. the information contained in them needs to be entered into a line of business system and processed….

….. so that the magazine is sent out every month and information such as Census data can be collated and analysed to identify needs and trends and be used to formulate future planning and infrastructure investment strategies.

Very few people understand the scale and complexity of the back office processes that support form processing or the pressure on staff to ensure this information is captured correctly and promptly.

Manual data entry – operators ‘keying in’ form data – is prone to errors

It can take several days for a task to be completed and there is a huge associated cost to the business for labour + temporary staff costs during peak times.

Forms ProcessFlows allows you to automatically capture an unlimited number of forms with no knock-on effect during peak times on resources

Our solution uses OCR ‘intelligent’ software to read, interpret and capture data fields.  If any data fields are blank or the information is unreadable or incomplete, a ‘rules engine’ software module attempts to fill in the missing information (e.g. incorrect post code) from a set of pre-defined ‘rules’.

This ensures that the process of inputting information into the business system continues with high efficiency and minimum human input

Forms ProcessFlows is designed to meet each business’s individual needs and the solution is simple to deploy – you could be up and running, fully trained and tested, within a matter of days.

As well as saving your business time and money processing forms, the solution can be leveraged to streamline other problematic processes within the organisation, further maximising your return on investment (ROI).

To find out how we have helped several organisations solve their form processing challenges and how we can help you with your forms, please get in touch with Antony Biondi at ProcessFlows on 01962 835179 or 07827950787

Email: abiondi@processflows.co.uk

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) – software reads machine produced text/characters (in defined zones of documents if required).  Simple solution and very accurate.
• ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) – ‘intelligent’ software capable of reading hand written information as well as machine produced text.  Not infallible as hand written information can often be difficult to decipher, i.e. Doctor’s prescriptions!
• IDR (Intelligent Document Recognition) - highly ‘intelligent’ software ideally used post document capture to classify documents in advance of a business process, e.g. Digital Mailroom.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Labour costs are less
• ‘Double-Keying’ improves accuracy
• Confidential information (data fields) can be split and entered by different people – added security as nobody sees the ‘complete picture’
• Quick – different time zones mean your data can be entered overnight so it is ready for you the next working day

When we published one of our first blog posts – The Multiple Methods of Data Capture – in May 2009, we had no idea the subject was that popular.  It has proven to us that Data Capture is something that organisations want to find out more about, so we have put together a series of short videos which will help explain.  The first one is clickable at the bottom of this post.

Data Capture might at first be thought of as merely a method of obtaining data for a computer.  It can be that simple, but when you start asking questions like:

• How much data do I need to capture?
• What type of documents do I need to capture?
• How much can I afford to capture?

….. Data Capture becomes a minefield.  The more you find out, the harder it is to make the right decision.

Avanquest can help and advise you on the best method(s) of data capture for your organisation – listening, identify the problems with you, then coming up with a data capture solution that fits in with the way you do business and your budget.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland invented barcodes having overheard a local food business boss asking for a system to help read product data automatically.

The final standard of barcodes as we know it today (Universal Product Code) was released in 1970 and first used a few years later.

Avanquest are extremely grateful, as the barcode has driven business process automation in lots of other areas . The ability for machines to read information without human input is invaluable in data entry, where it cuts costs and reduces ‘human error’.

Avanquest’s core business, Data Capture, has been transformed by this simple device.

We have used Barcodes extremely successfully with Cory Brothers for example, automatically extracting information from invoice documents (case study).

We’ve also helped RSPB use barcodes to identify membership documents and Sheffield Insulation Group use barcodes for their Proof of Delivery scanning, reducing duplication of data entry and minimising mistakes.

Bravo Google, we quite agree. Simple concept, well executed.

More information

Data Capture and Barcodes, how they work.

Still not sure? Contact us and we will try to help.

Malcolm Wilkes, Avanquest Solutions:

OCR (Optical Character recognition) and ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) software  ‘reads’ and extracts words and text from a document (paper or electronic) and then exports the data, along with the document, to another electronic system.  This could be your everyday line of business system, a data storage or document management repository, or a contact database such as excel, access or SQL.

OCR extracts data from structured documents.  ‘Intelligent’ and ‘thinking’ ICR technology is used when you need to extract information from the more challenging semi-structured and unstructured documents.

Depending on the types of documents you are trying to capture, rules are used to configure the extraction process.

Structured Documents

Example – Forms:

• OCR works well with forms because they are structured documents – the data is in the same place on each page
• You would setup a rule so that software only ‘looks’ in a specific location on the form
• You can also tell the software to ‘look’ for data in a regular expression.  Expression example: the value will always be two alpha characters followed by five numeric characters.

Semi-Structured and Unstructured documents

Semi-Structured Example – Invoices:

• ICR is required if you want to extract information from invoices, as they are not consistent They share the same document type and index field rules for extraction, but data it is not always in the same place on the page
• Invoices contain an invoice number, invoice date, net, VAT & gross totals, but no two invoices from different suppliers will be the same
• You would therefore setup a rule that would instruct the software to read every word on the entire page and look for keywords such as “Invoice Number”, “Document Number”, “Inv No” etc
• The software then looks for text in the vicinity of the keywords, usually to the right or underneath and extracts the value.

Example Unstructured – Contracts:

• Contracts generally contain documents of multiple types bundled together.  They are usually paper format as they are received by post or fax
• Rules can be defined to classify each document and extract different metadata fields for each type
• If the documents are complex, you can set up a rule that classifies the documents based upon text on the page
• If enough samples are fed in to the system, the software uses self-learned classifiers (it ‘learns as it goes’) to categorise the documents
• The text does not have to be static.

They are a great way of capturing paper based information into electronic format, for importing into your document management system.

Barcodes are used prior to scanning in several ways:

1. Pre-printed on the document to give a unique ID
2. Pre-printed on separator pages to indicate that a document is ending and a new document is beginning
3. Printed on labels (either pre-printed or printed on demand) and affixed to documents with unique values.

Capture software is able to read barcode information really quickly with amazing accuracy.  Reducing the number of errors means you can get the job done speedily, and no more manual indexing!

What exactly is a barcode?

• A barcode symbol consists of a series of vertical bars and spaces of various thicknesses
• These are broken down into groups of bars and space patterns which represent individual human recognisable characters (0-9/A-Z)
• Example barcode Construction (Human Readable) * 1 2 3 4 5 *
• Each barcode character consists of five black bars and four inter-spaced white spaces
• The information contained in a barcode is converted back into human readable text by a barcode scanner or specialised software.  This process takes a fraction of a second.