Large Volume Processing of Sensitive Documents in Record Time

The field of long-term claims enforcement is that part of claims management which is concerned solely with court-ordered claims. This constitutes one of the greatest challenges as these legally-binding judgments issued by a court are court documents which do not exist in digital form but only as printed documents in a variety of formats, sometimes also with hand-written additions. A further factor is that LZI is only active in large-scale business, in other words the company acquires several thousand judgments per customer, which it then processes. The portfolios originate in the widest possible range of industrial sectors, from telecommunication to insurance and e-Commerce.

Because of the need for processing large volumes of data, LZI has always been interested in automating processes and configuring them efficiently in order to provide maximum support to their teams in their work. The company customized the cash collection software solution to suit its own special needs so that it could optimize the way it works with them. But capturing the court judgments was a challenge in itself. In the past the printed documents were manually uploaded and the data maintained in complex Excel tables – an unwieldy process prone to errors.  To make this process easier, the LZI team engaged intensively with potential software solutions aimed at simplifying the capture of the judgments. But although the documents were in principle clearly structured, most of the systems came up against their limitations because the flimsy machine-printed documents with hand-written notes were very difficult to upload; another problem was also presented by the variety of formats.

The LZI management became aware of Ephesoft when talking to another debt collection agency. The team then took a closer look at the Transact platform solution. It quickly became clear that LZI had now found the system they had been seeking for so long. 

The Filing Department receives sealed boxes of court-ordered claims which have to be opened and scanned. At this time the staff can choose between the various high-performance machines for large-scale data capture and ultra-sensitive flat screen scanners for types of paper particularly difficult to read. Ephesoft Transact does not oblige LZI to use specific machines but allows files in any format to be uploaded – whether as an image file or directly as a data set in the correct batch class. The system allocates the information to the relevant customer data set and automatically uses OCR to upload the most important information. The digital file created in this way is then prepared in the debt collection software for operational processing. In addition to this connectivity, Microsoft integration was also an important factor for LZI as the team uses the Microsoft functionalities and security level across the entire company.

LZI can also offer its customers the service of accepting and processing their data in any possible form. The IT Department creates a fuzzy data-base from the data input and this data-base is then supplemented with the information from Ephesoft Transact. Details of this type can also be transferred into the debt collection software without any great manual effort.

“Thanks to Ephesoft Transact, three staff were recently able to add additional information to 16,000 judgments in four weeks. Without this system, a project of this nature would have previously been unthinkable. Using the same number of people working with the Excel table, the most we could have done in the same time would have been 600 judgments.” – Marlen Jahnke, Document Center Manager

The Ephesoft team was able to implement document input in just a few days from the project start and thus made the first part of the system available to LZI very quickly. Staff were therefore able to start working with the new tool at an early stage. During the course of the project it also became evident that the Book-keeping Department would also benefit from the Ephesoft platform for intelligent document processing. The scope of the project was therefore quickly extended to include book-keeping. Since that time Ephesoft Transact has become an integral part of LZI’s IT infrastructure. Things have gone so far that more and more departments are considering how they can integrate this solution into their processes so they can benefit from the opportunities offered by this flexible system. Other projects are already planned in the Incoming Mail Department and the teams are looking forward to being able to automate some of their processes in a targeted manner.

“Compliance with the GDPR is a critical factor in our success. Ephesoft Transact is helping us transfer the data quickly, accurately and securely from the printed documents into our systems, and is therefore significantly reducing the work-load on our teams.” – Sandra Szech, Managing Director, LZI Langzeitinkasso GmbH