What you have there my son
is EDRMS - Electronic Document Retrieval and Management System. Something I have spent - at work - well over a million quid on in the last few years. Its really good stuff when you get going. And chuck in OCR - which at this level works really really well. We scan in 10,000+ docs a week and the error rate is about 5%. Of the 95% that are read and validated, almost all of them are processed automatically and no need for human interation along the way. All people do now is process the exceptions. We're probably making a whole ton of people redundant now because there simply isnt work for them. Its astonishing what can be automated.

The system we use, we saw running as a demo in a rather large insurance company. They used it to process claim forms. They had a whole rules based thingy setup. When a claim came in, it went something like this:

Is it a claim? Under £100? And the claimant hasnt had a successful claim in last 12 months? Yes to all? Then print out a cheque and post.

The other rule was:

Is it a claim? Over £100? Yes? Send automatic rejection letter.

Simplified, yes, but probably saved them a fortune.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 27 Aug 2009, 11:53, 1 reply)

Errr....
Tel me it wasn't a susidiary of Lloyds of London?

If it was, then it's extremely likely that I worked on that software!
(dchurch bah, Thu 27 Aug 2009, 11:57, closed)

honestly cant remember
the solution was IBM Document Manager, Content Manager, and Kofax though.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 27 Aug 2009, 12:31, closed)

Hmmmm....
...this too was kofax.
(dchurch bah, Thu 27 Aug 2009, 13:11, closed)