THE NEWSLETTER OF IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEMS - ISSUE 2 MAY 14, 2004

IPS Customer Satisfaction Jumps 26%

IPS recently completed its second annual customer satisfaction survey, which provides us with independent evaluation of performance as our customers see it. According to SPG Consulting, over 26% of customers reported increased satisfaction with our services in 2003, while 68% were equally satisfied compared with 2002. On a 10-point Customer Satisfaction Index, IPS’s overall score rose from 8.2 in 2002 to 8.7 in 2003. Nearly 90% of customers indicated that they would continue to use our services, and nearly 40% anticipated an increase in the amount of business they will do with us in 2004. When asked if they would recommend IPS to a colleague, nearly 95% said that they would.

The results were particularly gratifying because IPS has focused considerable time and energy on upgrading our services over the past 12 months. According to SPG Consulting’s president, Jim Saller, “There are only a select few companies up in the same range of customer satisfaction as IPS.” We know our business depends on meeting customer expectations every day, and our annual satisfaction survey has become an important tool for making sure we do.

IPS Gains New Advertising Agency Client as Volume Jumps to Over 1 Million Images

The world’s fourth largest advertising agency recently awarded IPS a digital document processing contract to support its large-scale media billing operation. The agency receives a high volume of bills, called “affidavits,” from broadcast and cable companies from which it has ordered advertising time or space. The agency needs to have information from the affidavits keypunched into the accounting system and the affidavits themselves scanned for its in-house imaging system. Outside vendors handled the bulk of this work, but they did not enjoy the agency’s full confidence. In fact, for one of the agency’s premier accounts — a world-leading consumer products company — the agency performed all data entry and imaging in-house in order to avoid errors.

With the volume of affidavits expected to double, the agency went looking for a better solution. They found it at IPS. Today, we receive paper affidavits, and scan and perform quality checks on them at our New Jersey Imaging Center. Then we key punch the images with double-entry quality control, and index the images with the data, returning the indexed images and data files to our client. From our secure storage system, we transmit the images in Viewstar format to the agency’s system.

The agency achieved an immediate cost reduction. But more important to them was the ability to grow volume significantly without concern over quality or seeing costs grow at the same rate. In addition to handling all of the agency’s affidavits, IPS now processes accounts payable for print and billboard advertising, agency accounts payable, and even “job jackets” that detail all the costs of a job. Volume is already over 1 million images per year and continues to grow.

Business Continuity Efforts Expand to Protection of Vital Records

Business continuity planning has traditionally focused on data centers, networks, trading floors, call centers and other high-tech facilities. But recently, managers have begun focusing on another risk: the loss of paper documents vital to the organization’s survival.

The usual answer has been to archive boxes full of papers off-site. But the horror of September 11 — with its “rain” of documents over lower Manhattan — made it clear that archives are not the critical issue. Your most vital paper-based records are probably the ones in active use today, from contracts to regulatory filings, claims files to purchase orders, technical drawings to financial reports.

What to do about it? Increasingly, organizations are identifying certain kinds of documents as “vital records” and are having them scanned as soon as they are received or processed. The digital images are then uploaded to a secure off-site facility, where a further backup up is made and stored at yet another location. This “double redundancy” provides protection from any imaginable threat.

IPS recently won a contract from The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, the nation's fourth largest mutual life insurer, to scan, index and manage several million vital records. And Guardian is hardly an exception. Every year, we process millions of pages of vital records for forward-looking organizations that know certain paper-based information is just too vital to risk losing.

Paper or Digits?

The next time you send documents to be copied, or hit the “copy” button yourself, consider the difference between the “paper world” and the “digital world.”

In the paper world, we make copies. We ensure that file folders are updated with those copies. We store the folders, first in file drawers, and later in boxes, which we label and put into storage. And we maintain a physical inventory of everything in storage in case we need to retrieve it.

We also spend money for each click of the copy machine, each square foot of on-site or off-site storage, and for the hours it can take to retrieve files.

Contrast this with the digital world. We scan the document once to transform it into a digital image. We index the digital image with metadata that ties it to our enterprise information systems, from account codes to Social Security numbers. And that’s it.

The image and index data are stored on a server, where they are instantly accessible. When they are no longer active, they can be copied to tape or optical storage with a few keystrokes. From the moment the document becomes digital, it can be protected from loss at virtually no additional cost. Sure, we had to pay to scan it, just as we had to pay to make a copy. In fact, it’s the same process, but one creates an image on vulnerable, space-wasting paper, while the other transforms it into digital bits that can be transmitted or stored with equal ease.

Imaging Terms You Should Know

Image Format: Refers to the specification under which an image has been saved to disk or in which it resides in computer memory. There are many commonly used digital image formats in use. Some of the most used are PDF, TIFF, DIB, GIF, and JPEG. The image format specification dictates what image information is present and how it is organized in memory. Many formats support various sub-formats or 'flavors'.

Resolution: Indicates the number of dots, often measured in dpi, that make up an image on a screen or printer. The larger the number of dots, and thus the higher the resolution, the finer and smoother images can appear when displayed at a given size. Low resolution causes jagged characters. The ideal resolution is a trade-off between quality and the overhead in storage power and processing strength required to use it.