December 2005

Hallmark Wins Process Innovation Award

Retail solution designed by Cutting Edge Solutions with Fujitsu and Datacap

Congratulations to Hallmark Inc. of Kansas City, Missouri, recently named recipient of a 2005 Kinetic Information Process Innovation Award. Datacap customers have now won this award two years running American College of Physicians  won the Award in 2004. Hallmark was recognized for process improvements using Datacap Taskmaster that led to gains in productivity and profitability.

With more than a fifty percent share of the U.S. greeting cards market in the U.S., Hallmark Cards requires a efficient process for supplying cards to 43,000 retail locations in the United States. The solution designed by Datacap reseller Cutting Edge Solutions (CES) of Kansas City, significantly streamlined Hallmark's product ordering process.

When a card shop needs to replenish its inventory, it mails a reorder ticket. Hallmark receives between 5,000 and 15,000 reorder tickets a day, depending on the season and day of the week. According to Hallmark internal standards, order management personnel must process all incoming tickets within four-and-a-half hours.

The CES solution resulted in cost reductions of greater than 50%. "We were able to replace their $250,000 scanner with two $17,000 scanners and help them reduce their four-person scanning staff to one full-time person and one part-time person," says Jack Roberts, co-founder of CES.

To learn about Cutting Edge Solutions, click here. To read a profile of CES and Hallmark in the current issue of Business Solutions Magazine, click here.

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Take the 2005 Datacap Customer Survey

Participate in the Annual Year End Study - You Might Win $100!

We want to hear from you.
Just a few minutes of your time could have a significant impact on Datacap products and services. Help us identify what we do well and what we need to improve.

Click here and let us hear your voice! When you complete the survey, you'll be entered into a drawing to win one of five $100 American Express Gift Cards.

Happy Holidays to you and yours from Datacap!

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Distributed Capture Survey Results

Read the Free Research Report from Datacap, Canon and TAWPI

What is your organization doing about Distributed Capture? Read the latest Datacap survey, which was co-sponsored by Canon and The Association for Work Process Improvement (TAWPI). Almost 400 respondents from a wide variety of industries participated. Find out why they did it, what they learned and the benefits they received.

Click here to read the Research Report, free of charge.

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Datacap and Applied Docs Deliver Patriot Act Compliance

Automating Customs Documents for Freight Carriers Leads to a New Datacap Innovation

Datacap and its partner Applied Docs, of Ottowa, Ontario, have developed a new product to automate the processing of customs documents for trucking companies. The Express Traffic Accelerator (ETA),  automates the data entry of customs paperwork for shipping companies carrying goods across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

According to Keith Trafford, VP of Operations for Applied Docs, the Patriot Act significantly raised the bar for customs brokers, who traditionally handle the submission of packing slips and commercial invoices for shipping companies. Because customs brokers deal with so many variable forms, they have traditionally processed paperwork with large manual data entry staffs.

The new Patriot Act customs rules requires all paperwork to be submitted at the border before the truck arrives, rather than up to ten days afterwards. As a result, Trafford points out, "customs broker saw overtime costs for data entry personnel increase drastically."

"Other vendors either couldn't handle our volume proficiently or weren't accurate enough," said Applied Docs' president, Claude Paquin. "Each broker deals with 64 different document classes, coming from potentially 200,000 different shippers. With Datacap Taskmaster, we are getting field level accuracy results in the high 90% range on the first pass, once a profile has been set up for a particular client."

An Innovation for Datacap Customers

While developing the new application for Applied Docs, Datacap introduced a new capability that eases the set up of data location rules on a new document.

For variable documents, like invoices and shipping documents, Datacap Taskmaster creates a profile, or "Fingerprint," for each new document it encounters and stores it in the Taskmaster database. Once a fingerprint is created, the user can apply Datacap Reusable Rules to locate, recognize and validate data any way they choose.

Now, whenever a new fingerprint is created, a data entry operator uses Taskmaster's "Click N Key" feature to populate each data field with a single click on the image. After the first pass, Taskmaster "remembers" the location of the data and automatically populates the correct field whenever that document type is processed. This new capability simplifies the addition of new document types, particularly for users processing a wide variation of document types.

Datacap is currently refining and enhancing this new capability for availability in Taskmaster Release 7 in 2006.

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