Formtran Uses Advanced OCR Software To Assist Food Manufacturer And Distributor

Growing from a home kitchen and a single potato salad, Reser's Fine Foods now sells more than a million pounds of mashed potatoes a week from a plant with over 120,000 square feet of cooler, freezer, dry storage, production, and offices. With close to $300 million in sales, both wholesale and retail, the company is recognized as one of the nation's premier manufacturers and distributors of high-quality refrigerated food products to the grocery and food service industries.

Reser's must process up to 1,500 invoices a day. Each invoice is from a different vendor and in a different format. To keep its suppliers happy and retain its vendor discounts, as well as cut down on its invoice processing costs, Reser's accounting department had to find a way of automating its invoice processing and check balancing processes. In addition to cutting down data entry, Reser's wanted to automatically index invoices into their image filing system.

Formtran worked with Reser's to identify all the information required from the invoice, including header and table detail fields. The fields required by the financial system were separated from the fields required by the image filing system. Since it was important for Reser's to understand how the software worked and how different form types could be created, Formtran provided custom hands-on training so Reser's could be self-sufficient.