Datacap Taskmaster Streamlines Document Capture Process

Broadcast Music Inc. is a performing rights organization that represents nearly 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers. The non-profit company, founded in 1939, collects license fees on behalf of music creators from around the world who have selected BMI for representation in the United States. Artists on the roster include John Lennon, Chuck Berry, Willie Nelson, Thelonious Monk, The Beach Boys, and Aretha Franklin, to name just a few.

BMI collects licensing fees for approximately 4.5 million compositions - including fees for radio airplay, broadcast and cable television, Internet, live and recorded performances - which are distributed as royalties to the writers, composers and copyright holders it represents.

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The Challenge
Keeping track of all the transactions BMI handles generates volumes of paperwork. Between applications, licenses, vouchers, clearances, and reports, BMI headquarters in Nashville scans nearly 100,000 images a month, and stores them in a DocFinity document management system from Optical Image Technology (OIT). Indexing these document images for storage and retrieval is a complicated process, and BMI was looking for a way to automate this tedious manual process.

After an evaluation of document capture solutions, BMI invested in a Taskmaster system from Datacap. A key feature that attracted BMI is Taskmaster's ability to automatically create multiple index records for the same image, a capability supported by the DocFinity system.

The Solution
Taskmaster gives BMI a way to streamline the document capture process and reduce the manual keying required for indexing. More importantly, Taskmaster's tight integration with DocFinity provides BMI with an automated process that saves them significant time and effort.

After scanning, Taskmaster recognizes field data, such as account number, date and song titles, and present index operators with a custom indexing screen for each document to attach multiple index fields, verify accuracy and make any corrections necessary. BMI opted to add the Taskmaster Oracle database option for Oracle's robust relational database capabilities.

At the end of the capture process, once index fields are verified, Taskmaster releases verified index data into OIT's proprietary cascading hierarchy, with multiple index records for each image.