The Isle Of Man (Iom) Post Office’s Integrated Mailing Solutions (Ims)

The Isle of Man (IOM) Post Office’s Integrated Mailing Solutions (IMS)

by

Kevin Davies

The Isle of Man (IOM) Post Office’s Integrated Mailing Solutions (IMS) division recently purchased three high performance Kodak i1860 production scanners from an award winning electronic document scanning and data capture solution company. The thinking behind this purchase was to add additional document imaging capacity to its operations having won a substantial three-year high value forms processing contract from one of the UK’s best selling monthly magazines.

These new scanners can process volumes of up to 80,000 images per day, they are also able to capture images from a range of documents including such items as coupons and vouchers that can then be uploaded securely to the client’s mainframe computer.

The IMS held a comprehensive tender process and the contract was awarded to Capital Capture a Premier Kodak partner. Once selected they were instructed to supply the scanner hardware and associated software which included Kodak s own Capture Pro software, additionally some of the software modules were tailored in their forms design, specifically to cater to the IMS integration services. Furthermore, Autonomy Cardiff’s TeleForm 10.2 image capture technology was also implemented offering handwriting recognition and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capability which was a key requirement of the tender.

The IMS is situated at the IOM Post Office HQ in Douglas, it is the fastest growing division within the business and it experienced a growth in revenues of 30% last year. They service in the region of 140 clients which include local government, financial services and international commercial organisations. The IMS offer businesses a one-stop-shop providing a variety of services including mail opening, printing, fulfilment, document scanning and data capture, stationary and franking.

They are the first such company on the Isle of Man and Channel Islands to be accredited with ISO/IEC 27001:2005, guaranteeing confidentiality, integrity and availability of all their clients commercially sensitive information.

Recently the General Manager of the IMS, Tony Randle stated “We wanted best-of-breed scanner equipment which is robust, reliable and easy for staff to use. Research carried out by our own IT staff and advice from Capital Capture showed that the Kodak i1860 scanners were head and shoulders above the competition, and we re very pleased we made the decision to buy them.”

The Kodak iL860 scanner is equipped with a 500 sheet feeder and operates at 200 pages per minute, offering virtually unlimited scanning capacity. The Isle of Man Post Office has a long history of utilising Kodak scanners within its operations and currently they have 12 in use: five i200 series workgroup scanners, two i1440 departmental scanners, two i640 production scanners and now three top of the range i1860s.

Due to IMS s current business objectives two of the new i1860 scanners are dedicated to one client only, processing their day-to-day requirements, the third is on standby for business continuity purposes. All of the new equipment supplied by Capital Capture, including the software, was installed, tested and implemented within four weeks which included the training of staff on how to use the new equipment. To date operation has been faultless.

It is imperative to the continued success of both the IMS and their Clients that they are able to achieve 100% uptime so they built this into their strategy, this strategy is explained here in more detail by Tony Randle “To ensure that our client gets its order processing completed, aggressive SLAs are in place meaning we guarantee 53,000 images are processed each day prior to a 2.30pm deadline, with the residue of documents handled by 6.30pm.There’s no room for system downtime hence having a spare i1860 available. As we are located in the middle of the Irish Sea, failover has to be instant – we simply can’t wait for an engineer to fly in if there’s an issue which our local service and support supplier can’t deal with.”

Naturally as a business objective the Isle of Man Post Office wants to increase the amount of scanning contracts that they service as much as possible, this is good for the local government and also serves to attract new business to the island.

Lisa Duckworth, Isle of Man Post Office’s head of support services, says, “The purchase of the i1860 scanners was fundamental to us winning the biggest client in our history a deal which demonstrates we can beat the largest data capture companies in the UK and abroad. Our value is cost competitiveness, speed of turnaround, but most importantly the fact we’re a post office everything is under one roof for clients which ensures safe, secure delivery day in, day out.”

To obtain information about the Kodak production scanner contact Capital Capture, we offer unique document scanning,

data capture

and document management services to improve efficiency and streamline business administrative processes.

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ArticleRich.com