FedEx Speeds More Information to Customers with Cutting-Edge Worldwide Scanning Technology
The $20 billion FedEx Corp. is one of the leading global providers of transportation, e-commerce and supply-chain management services. The company recently implemented the largest distributed document imaging application in the world to increase shipment visibility, accelerate airbill processing and streamline customs crossings.
Following more than a year of extensive testing by the FedEx IT team, the company chose Kofax VRS, Adrenaline and ImageControls document imaging technologies as critical components of the solution. By spring, 2002 FedEx will capture shipping data for 1.2 million packages daily at up to 1000 scan and capture sites around the world.
The Problem
Most of FedEx's 5 million daily shipments are handled with the company's fully automated PowerShip system. However, more than a million shipments begin with handwritten airbills. Previously, originals or carbon copies of these airbills were shipped to the company's Memphis headquarters for scanning and processing. The new distributed system has cut data capture and processing time for these forms from three to six days to just eight hours.
The company says the front end of the system was crucial. Handwritten originals in varying ink colors and carbon copies were difficult to scan effectively and the employees who would do the scanning at remote FedEx stations weren't capture experts. The system had to produce unprecedented image quality automatically and with an interface simpler than a photocopier.
The Solution
The company integrated VRS to provide the required image quality. VRS is Kofax's award-winning, automated document image perfecting solution. VRS 2.0 won Transform Magazine's "Best of Show" award at AIIM 2001 for its unparalleled document image quality without user intervention. VRS automatically straightens, crops and optimizes exposure in real time.
"VRS made our distributed scanning operation possible because it produces the clearest possible images without our remote end users knowing anything about document imaging," said Todd Hollenbeck, managing director for shipment data capture for FedEx.
VRS helps capture address, phone number and account information for the shipper and recipient as well as other shipping information from the airbill. The data initiates the payment cycle, informs downstream operations of inbound shipments and enables paperless international shipping processes. Before and after scans of similar documents may be viewed at www.kofax.com/products/virtualrescan.
One-Button Interface
FedEx chose Kofax's ImageControls toolkits to achieve the required ease of use. "Our station operators are not skilled in document scanning and don't have the time to quality check every image we capture," Hollenbeck said. "We wanted to make the scanning process as simple as feeding documents into the scanner and hitting the ‘release' button on the screen. It dovetails perfectly with the automated VRS scan correction."
ImageControls is a powerful document capture toolkit that has been used to develop many major document and forms processing applications – including Ascent Capture from Kofax. At FedEx that functionality has been seamlessly embedded in the custom airbill processing application. For example, ImageControls invokes the bar code reader on the Kofax Adrenaline Image Processing Accelerator — a hardware product that runs in a PCI slot inside the host PC — without the scan operator's knowledge. The process captures the airbill number, a key index value.
Adrenaline Scanner Controllers do more for FedEx than interpret bar codes. They connect the Bell & Howell 8000-Series scanners to the host PCs via a high-speed "video" interface and accelerate common image processing functions using onboard processors. Adrenaline ensures that the Bell & Howell scanners operate at their rated speed of over 100 pages per minute — even while interpreting bar codes and performing image cleanup.