Remote Scanning and Document Processing SIRVA Reduces Processing Cost and Document Cycle Time

SIRVA, Inc., based in Westmont, Illinois, is a leader in providing relocation solutions to a diverse customer base around the world. Among the company’s well-recognized brands are Allied, Global, and North American Van Lines. The company offers innovative ways for customers to achieve their individual business goals, while providing global end-to-end relocation services, including program development and management, home purchase and home sale services, household goods moving, and mortgage services.

SIRVA conducts more than 365,000 relocations per year, transferring corporate and government employees as well as moving individual consumers. The company operates in more than 40 countries with approximately 7,800 employees and an extensive network of agents in more than 175 countries. SIRVA provides a variety of IT services that support drivers, fleet owners and independent van line agents, including a distributed capture application from Datacap that enables 1100 SIRVA agents in the field to scan and upload shipping documents to SIRVA headquarters. This assures rapid delivery of documents to SIRVA’s proprietary document management system, which results in faster processing, better customer service and reduced mailing costs.

SIRVA's Tim Smith reports faster processing time and reduced costs, among other efficiencies.

The Challenge

For SIRVA, every household move generates an average of 25 pages of shipping documents. Previously, SIRVA agents used to mail or overnight documents to one of SIRVA’s two corporate scanning and processing centers, using Datacap Taskmaster data and document capture software, integrated with SIRVA’s own custom document management system.

In 2002, Datacap introduced Taskmaster Web, a browser-based solution for scanning and indexing over a browser. SIRVA saw it as an opportunity to reduce processing time and reduce cost and they began to formulate a plan to integrate Taskmaster Web into their operations.

The Solution

When a SIRVA driver returns to the agent’s office with the shipment paperwork, the agent logs in to a special SIRVA extranet website, enters a password, and scans the documents remotely using Taskmaster Web. The agent’s benefit from a faster payment cycle and have web access for queries on shipment paperwork. SIRVA found the Fujitsu FI-4110 & FI-4120 line of scanners to be the right scanner for most agents and worked with Fujitsu to provide the agents special pricing for these scanners.

The shipment paperwork is scanned by batches, bar code separator pages are used to identify each contract within each batch and most documents contain a bar code that identifies that document’s doc type name (bills of lading, inventory etc). Other documents are recognized through OCR or pattern matches.

After remote scanning, Taskmaster Web uploads the document images to the Taskmaster Web Server in SIRVA’s main processing center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There, index operators review the documents and index only those documents that have not been recognized by Datacap recognition and commit the images to the repository.

The Results

"The Taskmaster Web solution has helped us reduce processing time for shipments by an average of two days and resulted in greater efficiency,” Says Tim P. Smith, who manages the application for SIRVA. “SIRVA has reduced its scanning costs by working with the agents and scanning most of the paper work at the agent’s facilities."

SIRVA has begun to expand this solution to the Corporate Relocation business for further efficiencies and to provide web access for its corporate customers. Additionally, SIRVA is evaluating this same solution with its businesses in the UK and other international operations.