EDAC's facility in Fredericksburg, VA offers a secure location with dedicated spaces for physical document storage, scanning operations, and validation processes. Our experienced staff is positioned to manage and operate the project with precise control. Along with this experience comes the confidence of security clearances ranging from public trust to Top Secret.
The original documents and the electronic version go through many steps during the backfile conversion. These steps are described below:
1. Document Transport
A dedicated EDAC truck and crew will be allocated for pickup and deliveries of documents, eliminating any third party access to the documents. The pickups and deliveries will occur at pre-defined intervals. When the boxes of documents reach the EDAC facility, the boxes / documents are inventoried and logged into our electronic tracking system. As soon as the lot has completed the entire process, the documents will be shipped via truck in the same manner as the pick up.
2. Document Preparation
Once the documents have been inventoried and logged, the files are prepared for scanning. This process will include document inspection for the age and nature of the document in order to determine what method of scanning that would be used. Exception documents or those requiring special care will be identified by the scan operator. Exception documents could be comprised of irradiated documents, which are extremely brittle, older, and frailer documents that would not likely survive passing through an automatic document feeder, and pages that require special image enhancement to facilitate legibility. Because of the volume and timeframe of this effort, document preparation will be performed by dedicated personnel.
3. Imaging
EDAC uses a dedicated workgroup environment to accomplish the actual scan operation. The company employs high performance scan stations with image processing accelerators connected to high speed duplex production scanners with imprinting capabilities. Some of these scanners are equipped with Virtual ReScan Technology (VRS). VRS technology allows "on-the-fly" image cleanup of documents whose brightness, contrast, skew or noise falls outside of a pre-defined threshold. This ensures the quality of the scans including black border removal and allows the operator to quickly cleanup the image without having to change the scanner settings and rescan the document.
EDAC utilizes "tier 1" capture software packages to digitize all images and provide metadata for retrieval. Software features include image capture, image processing, form identification, document separation, index validation and verification, quality control and for document / data release to the storage repository.
4. Data Capture & Indexing
After the batch has been separated into documents, the data fields will be extracted and attributed to each of the documents. In the Validation queue, the operator sees the resultant data value interpreted by the software on one side of the screen with the corresponding section or "snippet" of the image on the other side. The operator can then compare the two to ensure that the data is correctly interpreted and edit the data field if the data is invalid or incomplete.
5. Data Quality
The quality of data will be ensured through a number of steps intrinsic to the document and data capture process. First, image cleanup is employed using Virtual ReScan (VRS) technology and through temporary and permanent image cleanup profiles. The higher quality of the original image lends itself to improving the automatic character recognition rates as well as the operators' ability to validate against the image. A quality control queue and Verification queue are added to the process as well.
During Verification, an operator assesses the input of the software and the data files modified by the Validation operator. Once the verification process is complete, the QA team will perform a statistical sampling of the documents and data to ensure accuracy is maintained. User profiles and user tracking will also be implemented to identify problem areas back to the individual operator for corrective action.
6. Document and Data Release
The capture software utilized can be released to an ODBC compliant database where the metadata will be populated directly into the field types required by the defined database; burned to a CD, converted to film, or released to some other customer defined repository. Based on the Customer requirements, the formats can be TIFF, PDF, PDF Image + Text, JPEG, and numerous others.