The business took an ECM Connect platform, which is capable of processing 300 million customer documents a year, last year, and has now relocated it to the 930sqm facility. Total investment for facility and platform was £1.6m, and it is part of Communisis’ long-term business strategy, triggered by the winning of a contract to provide an outbound service for a large high-street bank.
The platform creates copies of paper, digital, mobile or email documents and can store them within a client’s existing document management platform. Information is automatically transferred to a data centre and hard copies are destroyed on site.
The facility, which opened in April, is Communisis’ first purpose-built site for digitisation, having previously operated from clients’ premises, and the platform has been scaled up.
“We knew that a wholly owned facility was the surest way of meeting this client’s need for a high-speed, high-capacity scanning operation, where quality and reliability are essential,” said Communisis managing director David Herridge.
The platform, which is based on an open track, vacuum assisted scanning path and has a belt-fed scanner with dual cameras to capture front and back images simultaneously, was supplied by IBML, with imaging and workflow components coming from Kofax.
“There are very few platforms capable of dealing with the scale, turnaround times and reliability we need. We also have previous experience operating IBML scanners and have an in-house team of Kofax software developers. This enables us to deal with complex requirements quickly and efficiently for our clients,” added Herridge.
Communisis is now expanding the capabilities of a second scanning site near Liverpool and will be appointing a partner to provide offshore data capture validation and indexing services.
Herridge said: “We have a project that requires us to process 80,000 images in a four-hour, night time window. Having an offshore partner means there is manpower on hand to deal with any data that can’t be processed automatically.”
Following a year in which Communisis restructured into a more simplified model comprising two divisions, it recently reported revenue and profit growth for its 2016 preliminary results.
