City of Calgary Streamlines Forms Processing and Document Indexing With Kofax VirtualReScan -VRS- and Cardiff TELEform; More Than 1 Million Pages Processed Each Year.

Business/Technology Editors

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 24, 2002

Kofax Image Products Inc. and Cardiff Software Inc. have teamed to provide the city of Calgary in Alberta, Canada with a comprehensive forms processing and automated scanning solution to simplify its document capture.

More than 1 million pages are processed in the city's tax and assessment business units each year.

"The combination of technologies from Kofax and Cardiff has joined superior capabilities of two industry leaders to offer the most advanced solutions for document capture and recognition," said Rick Murphy, general manager of Kofax's Image Processing Business Unit.

"This integration between our products will enable customers, such as the city of Calgary, to achieve high levels of accuracy and productivity in electronically capturing documents and data for forms and non-forms processing."

The city of Calgary's Assessment Business Unit is responsible for assessing property based on market values, which are used to calculate annual property taxes. As part of the annual business cycle to establish accurate property values, the city must update its records with current property information.

Managing this fiscal project manually has been expensive and labor intensive. However, the task is necessary to ensure property taxes are fair and equitable. To streamline the project and reduce the time and cost associated with its completion, the city turned to Seward Consulting, an imaging solutions and consulting firm, to implement a forms processing and quality control solution that utilized both the Cardiff TELEform(R) and Kofax VRS products.

"The combination of Cardiff and Kofax technologies has significantly improved the department's productivity and revolutionized the data gathering process with customer survey forms. The technologies facilitate a consistent approach to process customer survey forms returned via mail, fax and e-mail," said Martin Wong, project manager for the city of Calgary.

"With TELEform's flexible information capture capabilities, our business units can accurately read, interpret and transfer data from different sources of documents, both forms and non-forms, into a consolidated database. The addition of VRS has dramatically improved the quality of the scanned images, particularly some very old property assessment cards. VRS' image enhancement capabilities resulted in scanned images that are often better than the original."

As part of the automated document process to scan, capture, load and index paper documents into the electronic document management system, the city uses TELEform to create small peel-and-stick labels that serve as mini-forms. These mini-forms include the key processing information required to load and index a scanned document. This flexible approach and ease-of-use addresses any document type or size and has successfully replaced the manual task of data entry. By using this technology, the city is able to effectively process large quantities of paper documents of different types in a very short time.

With VRS, the city has improved the overall quality of scanned images. The technology has reduced the time-consuming data validation task, allowing staff to focus on other responsibilities.

"A single city technician can now process up to 1,500 documents per day with 99 percent data and process accuracy," Wong added. "Without these technologies, our productivity would be cut in half."

According to Emily Deere, director, product manager at Cardiff, VRS consistently improves the quality of the scanned images captured by TELEform.

"Cardiff recognizes that VRS significantly enhances TELEform's processing capabilities, providing a powerful image-perfecting solution that offers high levels of accuracy in data captured from scanned documents," Deere said. "TELEform, coupled with VRS, can greatly reduce the time needed to prepare documents for scanning, increasing optical character recognition accuracy and eliminating expensive, time-consuming document rescanning."

The city uses a variety of Fujitsu scanners as part of its forms processing solution with Kofax VRS. VRS effectively enhances each form's manually entered information and instantly checks and adjusts its documents for alignment, brightness, contrast and image clarity. Any inconsistencies are immediately corrected by VRS so only the straightest, most readable images are released into the system.

VRS capabilities enable the city to efficiently process documents with unique specifications and characteristics. The system can process old and sometimes deteriorating documents and successfully recognize images printed on color paper, which are sometimes difficult for scanners alone to read and process.

About Seward Consulting

Seward Consulting Ltd. is a privately owned and operated company located in Edmonton, Canada. Seward was founded in 1983 and over the years has delivered quality business and information system services from various vendors including Cardiff Software, Kofax Image Products and others. Seward has been a Sales Channel Partner with Cardiff since 1995.

More information about Cardiff and Kofax Image Products, available through Seward, can be found at www.sewardimaging.com.

About Cardiff Software Inc.

Cardiff's XML-based eBusiness and eGovernment automation solutions are used by more than 20,000 organizations, including Global 2000 companies, to automate a wide range of business transactions and processes. Cardiff's Information Capture, eForm Management and eDocument Automation products work together to replace manual processing with automated online systems.

About Kofax

Kofax Image Products (www.kofax.com), a division of the DICOM Group plc, is a leading developer of application software and image processing products for the Electronic Data and Document Capture (EDC) market. EDC is essential to helping paper-intensive organizations economically, reliably and securely incorporate paper-based information into their electronic business processes.

Note to Editors: Software VirtualReScan is a trademark of Kofax Image Products Inc. Adrenaline, ImageControls and Kofax are registered trademarks of Kofax Image Products Inc. ISIS is a registered trademark of Pixel Translations, a division of ActionPoint Software Inc. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.