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Overview
Public statistics are data obtained through censuses, sample surveys or administrative records and are designed for timely decision-making and efficient management. For this reason, the statistical information generated must be reliable, homogeneous and comparable.
For the data collected to be of practical use, the statistics must be of adequate quality and be presented in a way that facilitates their correct use. For this reason, solutions for capturing data contained in documents improve performance in the quantification process.
Challenges
The main challenges of this project, carried out by the company Modoc S.A. for a government statistics agency in Argentina, were the time allocated to carry out the process and the need to obtain quality images, from which the data would be interpreted.
The booklets (12 and 32 pages) were printed on both sides on A3 size paper, folded and saddle-bound with hooks; during the preparation process, the spine of the booklets was cut, transforming it into individual A4 sheets to be placed in the scanner. Although the paper was cut with specific guillotines for this type of work, sometimes there was some cutting residue that could cause two or more sheets to stick together or paper residue to come off, making it difficult to process efficiently.
Thus, the objective was to digitize the census booklets in the shortest possible time, obtaining monochrome and full-color images automatically and simultaneously.
Solution
This project, carried out by the company Modoc S.A., consisted of digitizing booklets, used for data collection, where around 40 KODAK i4650 production scanners were used, of which 34 units were in operation and 6 backup units, to facilitate preventive and corrective maintenance in the event of technical contingencies that could arise in any equipment and minimize the impact on stoppages due to the necessary processing, increasing the productivity of the body responsible for this task.
The solution was accompanied by a software platform for capturing documents and extracting data, for which KODAK Capture Pro Limited Edition software was used, which allowed the data to be reliably entered into the system for quantitative and qualitative analysis, in addition to the incorporation of recognition software from ReadSoft for storage
Benefits
The documents were organized in boxes with barcodes, placed on pallets arranged by province. The documents were scanned per pallet/box and once scanned, they were stored in their corresponding box.
From the beginning to the end of the process, the box number was captured with a barcode reader so that the traceability system could update the status of the process in which each box was located.
Once the images of the booklet pages had been captured, the data from each one was processed and interpreted with ICR, OCR, OMR and BCR (Barcode) recognition software specifically designed for surveys and censuses, achieving the established objective in an optimal and precise manner.
With the above, Modoc S.A. reached 435 million digitized images and 5.4 billion pieces of processed data. The integrity of the booklets was maintained, avoiding damage to the information, and the operability of the solution environment was achieved correctly.
