FORM INPUT SYSTEM
Using ABBYY FormReader in banking
Finansbank uses ABBYY FormReader for automatic input of credit card application forms
The principal thing we need from a form processing application is input accuracy. No input errors can be tolerated, as its our clients accounts that are at stake. ABBYY FormReader not only provided us with the best input accuracy there is, but it also provided us with a great increase in the speed of input.
Finansbank was founded in 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey and has been rapidly expanding ever since. The number of its branches has grown from just 4 at the beginning of the 1990s to more than 100 and is expected to increase as the bank is planning to open new branches in Istanbul and in many regions of Anatolia. FINANSBANK, Inkilap Mah. Dr. Fazil Kucuk Cad. No:11 Umraniye Istanbul Turkey www.finansbank.com.tr/english
Metin Ornek IT Project Manager, Finansbank (Turkey) When a client wants to obtain a credit card from a bank, he has to complete an application form and to provide some additional documents like the photocopies of his passport or revenue certificate. The information from an application form should be entered into the banks database together with the accompanying documents. At Finansbank, Credit Card & Store Card Application Form Processing employed 80 operators to process forms, and this personnel could handle only 1,000 forms per day. In 2000 the bank was expecting to reach 10,000 forms per day and thus it started to look for an effective form processing solution. IWith the help of technical specialists from Cadet Computer and Electronic Systems Limited, a network solution based on three ABBYY FormReader licenses was installed and the workflow was organized as follows: Bell&Howell 2000 DFB duplex scanners are used to scan application forms and appendices; in order to ensure complete correspondence between paper documents and their scanned images, an endorser is used (printer built into scanner); ABBYY FormReader automatically detects machinereadable forms and recognizes them using its powerful OCR/ICR/OMR/barcode recognition technologies; after that the recognized data are verified, both automatically with the help of automatic validation rules and visually by operators (all this guarantees 100% reliable results) and registered at the NovaManage EDM System; the necessary information is then exported into Oracle RDBMS and the appendices Xerox copies of passports or revenue certificates are saved as image files into a special folder, from which they can be viewed at any moment by the means of the NovaManage EDM System.

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Cadet Computer and Electronic Systems Limited was founded in 1995 to provide its customers with Computer Aided Design platforms, such as electronic design automation (EDA), and has been further expanded to develop Electronic Document and Workflow Management (EDM), as well as Product Data Management solutions (PDM). Gomec Sok. 37/Acibadem, Istanbul, Turkey Tel.: +3273520 www.cadet.com.tr
This automated data input system has exceeded all expectations. It takes the system only 90 seconds to scan, recognize, verify, register and export four A4 pages together with 3 to 5 attachments. As a result, Finansbank have been able to reduce the number of operators from 80 to 10, while increasing the throughput from 1,000 to 10, 000 forms per day. In 2001 Finansbank was able to acquire four additional licenses without making any changes in the overall architecture of the input system, which proves that the system is highly and easily scalable. Finansbank is planning to upgrade its system to ABBYY FormReader Enterprise Edition, which includes some additional features for reliable network processing of multipage forms.
More information about ABBYY at www.abbyy.com
ABBYY Software House (Headquarters) P.O. Box #54 Moscow, Russia, 129301 Tel.: +7 (095) Fax.: +7(095) office@abbyy.com ABBYY Europe GmbH Anglerstrasse 6 Munich, Germany, 80339 Tel.: +49 (0) 0 Fax: +49 (0) 59 info@abbyyeu.com ABBYY Ukraine P.O. Box #23 Kyiv, Ukraine, 02002 Tel.: +Fax: +sales@abbyy.ua ABBYY USA 3823 Spinnaker Court Fremont, CA 94538, USA Tel.: +Fax: +sales@abbyyusa.com ABBYY Europe GmbH, UK Office 3 South Mill Trading Centre South Mill Road, Bishops Stortford CM23 3DY, England Tel.: +44 (0)Fax: +44 (0)mail@abbyy.co.uk

2004 ABBYY Software House. ABBYY and FineReader are registered trade marks of ABBYY Software House. All other trade marks are property of their respective owners. Part # 1286e Address: Kasatkina Str. 11, building 1, 129301, Moscow, Russia, P.O. Box #54, ABBYY Software House. Phone: +7 (095) 783 3700, Fax: +7 (095) 783 2663, office@abbyy.com; www.abbyy.com

ABBYY (BIT SOFTWARE)

ABBYY FORMREADER, AN AUTOMATED FORMS INPUT SYSTEM
In todays digital business world, there is mounting pressure to cut costs of paper handling. If you deal with forms every day and need fast access to vital business information, forms automation can help you significantly enhance and accelerate the data collection process. Forms automation is entering the high-tech mainstream, where vendors increasingly find users asking for uncomplicated, user-friendly applications with a shorter payback. With forms automation, most or all of the imaged or scanned data on each form is intelligently recognised, verified and extracted. One such product designed to reduce the strain, expense and error rate of manual input is ABBYY FormReader, a software application for automated data input from paper forms into information systems and databases. This article is designed to show you the big picture of what ABBYY FormReader is and what it does.
What is ABBYY FormReader?
ABBYY FormReader is a tool for the automated capture and export of data from printed sources into information management systems and databases. The product uses ABBYYs award-winning FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) technology for processing data fields in printed and hand-printed forms. The data capture process is made up of three stages: 1) template creation; 2) system tuning and customisation so that different kinds of forms can be recognised and 3) forms processing involving form recognition, data verification and data export into a database, document repository or file, say an Excel spreadsheet. ABBYY FormReader relieves users of the hardest part of forms processing: the manual input of documents. In short, the product cuts down the amount of time spent inputting data, i.e. the extraction of data from completed forms, thereby freeing users from hours of manual input.
What kind of forms can ABBYY FormReader process?
ABBYY FormReader can be used to process all kinds of forms: cheques, bills, questionnaires, warranty cards, application forms, ballot forms, examination results, social security forms - the list is endless. The volume of documents that can be processed per day can range from 100 complex multi-page forms to 1,000 simple one-page documents. Those customers who need to process still higher volumes may consider using ABBYY Enterprise Forms.
How does ABBYY FormReader process forms?
Now its time to look in more detail at the two main stages of how ABBYY FormReader processes forms: application set-up and form inputting. Application set-up: This is where the application is given the information of where on the scanned form images the data is to be collected. A new batch is created which holds a form template for each of the different types of forms being processed and for each page, in the event of multipage forms.
All scanned/opened images are saved to and processed within this batch which also holds information on the user preferences for the batch, such as scanning options, recognition options, user patterns and data types as well as the form templates. In other words, a batch is simply a folder on your hard drive containing system files (templates, data types), images and files with recognition results. So, before inputting any forms, you must first create a batch and design the templates the application is to use when processing the scanned forms. Form inputting: Once the application has been installed, the necessary template(s) designed and a new batch created, you can start inputting the forms. The procedure is as follows: 1. Place a batch of forms in the scanners ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) and start the scanning process by pressing the Scan button. The scanned images of the forms will be added to the newly created batch in sequential order. 2. Start recognition by clicking the Match Template button. ABBYY FormReader then automatically locates all the completed fields on the form image, recognises and verifies them. Automated template matching avoids the need for any advance sorting of documents prior to scanning. 3. Verify the recognition results. This will require manual verification and correction of all ambiguous or uncertain characters the application was unable to recognise. 4. Click the Save button to export the recognised data into a database or file. ABBY FormReader provides built-in support of SQL (Structured Query Languages)- databases, workflow and content management applications, resulting in fast and reliable data export.

What are the main benefits of ABBYY FormReader?
Software & Hardware Requirements: PC with Pentium 133 processor or higher Operating system: Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 3), Windows 2000 16Mb with Windows 95/98/ME; 32Mb with Windows NT/2000 94Mb of free hard disk space for minimal installation; 150 Mb for full installation TWAIN-compatible scanner mouse or other pointing device CD-ROM drive VGA-monitor (600x800 or higher resolution) USB or LTP port (Windows 95 OSR2 with USB support or higher OS required for working with USB-port protection key)
Manual input of a large number of forms is an error-prone, time-consuming and labourintensive process. With ABBYY FormReader though a single operator can process hundreds of forms a day. And all you need is a scanner, a computer and a desk. (See also sidebar Software & Hardware requirements). ABBYY FormReader supports all types of scanners,

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from SOHO to high-volume production scanners. It also supports the TWAIN interface, and scanning can be carried out from within the application itself. Can output be increased? Yes, with one additional licence your output volume can increase substantially without the need to hire additional staff. And unlike humans, ABBYY FormReader doesnt get tired as the day goes by, thereby increasing the quality and accuracy of your recognition results. ABBYY FormReader 4.1. is available now and pricing starts from EUR1,850 excluding VAT. The software runs under Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95 as well as Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 (SP3). [sidebar] ABBYY FormReader, a User View Of course its easy to believe what a vendor has written on the tin or box, but what better way to endorse a product than to hear from one of ABBYYs customers. Take the Building Society Osiedle Mlodych in Poznan, Poland. Early 2000 it decided to change the way public utilities services were offered. To this end, it required the Yes vote of the majority of the Societys members. The decision was to be based on 10 voting procedures in which each question depended on the answers given to the previous one. Therefore, the Building Society faced a problem in that it couldnt have thousands of members wait until the end of the voting procedure. To speed up the data collection process, the Society turned to DSA Poland, distributor of ABBYY FormReader, to help them with the bulk input of thousands of forms into a computer. This is what triggered the Arena project since the meeting of Osiedle Mlodych members was to take place in a large stadium in Poznan. As the number of members that would attend the meeting was unknown, the Board decided to prepare 15,000 sets of voting cards of 24 different cards each, amounting to a total of 360,000 cards. Cards were printed in DIN A5 size on thick paper. Each one of the 15,000 24-card sets contained a unique number to eliminate the possibility of fraud. A separate template was prepared for every card, yielding a total of 24 different templates. The main task of ABBYY FormReader was to rotate the image and identify a form template (i.e. to avoid simultaneous processing of cards from different voting sessions); to read the number and checkmarks during scanning and to export the results to a MS Access database. In all, four Kodak scanning stations were used that were connected to two additional PCs for verifying and preparing the data processing tasks. Additional support from Dicom Polska and Kodak Polska was also available. The actual number of members present at the meeting exceeded 5,000. The meeting lasted 10 hours, and there were seven voting sessions held during this meeting. The average scanning speed was 16,070 pages per hour, and the average reading speed was 11,520 pages per hour. For more information on the Arena project, go to www.novadys.com or www.dsa.com.pl. Notes to editors:

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About ABBYY ABBYY Software House is a software provider of document recognition and linguistic technologies. ABBYY specialises in the development of software for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), linguistics, semantics and electronic lexicography. Products from ABBYY include the FineReader line of OCR, ICR and OMR software, and FineReader development tools. Companies that license ABBYY OCR/ICR technologies include SER Systems AG, Siemens Nixdorf, Samsung Electronics, C Technologies, Sumitomo Electric Systems, L&H/Kurzweil, Arkenstone, Banctec, Visionshape, Acer, Compaq, Microtek, OTG Software, Grantsmart, Lexmark, Mustek, Umax, NewSoft, Primax and Jet Fax. For more information, visit www.abbyy.com. ABBYY FormReader, ABBYY FineReader and ABBYY Enterprise Forms are registered trademarks of ABBYY. All other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

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