IKON Document Services Wins In The Litigation Support Industry By Servicing Clients With Document Imaging Technology

The push toward digitization of enormous document files is increasingly penetrating corporate headquarters, manufacturing operations, and professional services.

The litigation side of legal practice has become a leading customer of high-speed document imaging to provide data that is both searchable and distributable whether on desktop or laptop. Working from a service bureau perspective to meet the ever-increasing needs of production imaging systems, industry leader IKON Document Services has constructed imaging "pipelines" capable of massive throughput. Radian Systems, Inc. provided hardware, proprietary software, and integration expertise to make it all happen.

IKON Document Services is a division of IKON Office Solutions, a $4.5 billion worldwide marketing and distribution corporation. IKON's imaging services are used by many customers around the world to convert paper documents to electronic images that can be used in data processing applications. A division of IKON Document Services, Digital Litigation Support (DLS), specializes in servicing the litigation support industry. Other IKON services include staffing, equipment, and full management for copying, mailing, faxing, records management, imaging and electronic printing.

IKON's New York DLS office has implemented a cutting-edge imaging system for capturing images and associated information from paper documents. This system is used to process customers' documents at very high volumes, thus allowing IKON to satisfy the demands of many clients simultaneously. The system is also installed in IKON's Atlanta and Washington D.C. sites. The system consists of two Kodak Imagelink™ 923D scanners that are controlled by Radian Systems' WorldScan™ application, which in turn feed WorldScan Distributed Object Manager™ (WSDOM), an automated system for post-scan processing of batches of images through each image processing step.

"We found WSDOM to be very robust and dependable," stated Frank Hood, Vice President of Operations at IKON DLS. "We processed 3.6 million images through the system in a 30 day period without a single technical support call," he said, "and I think that speaks for itself." IKON's New York office has a large litigation customer with very demanding quality and throughput requirements. WorldScan and WSDOM, combined with rigorous document tracking and audit procedures, have allowed IKON NY to satisfy its prime customer and at the same time provide services to other customers. "IKON has worked very closely with Radian Systems to meet the exacting demands of our customers. This partnership has been very successful for both parties," Hood added.

The high volumes demanded by IKON are combined with customer requirements for strict quality standards. An automated system for processing batches of images through various image-processing steps is therefore required. These steps include image enhancement (for "cleaning up" the images to make them as readable as possible), quality assurance (for reviewing images to ensure best quality), rework (for re-scanning images of poor quality), OCR (for converting the image documents to text), and export (for formatting images, text, and associated data for delivery to the customer). Figure 1 depicts the system configuration.

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Figure 1.  IKON New York System Configuration

"The efficiencies gained by using specialized scanning and image processing software like WorldScan and WSDOM can benefit any document imaging system, even those with native support for high-volume scanners," said Ken Tighe, President of Radian Systems. He noted that WorldScan and WSDOM features such as automatic image rotation, image cleanup, quality assurance and re-scan, and full-text OCR, are rarely found in off-the-shelf imaging retrieval systems.

Radian Systems is known for its expertise in high-volume document capture and image processing subsystems. WorldScan is a complete scanner driver and control software solution for the Kodak Imagelink 9500, 7500, and 5500 high-speed scanners, as well as the older 923, 990 and 500 models. WorldScan is the flagship of the next generation of 32-bit high-speed scanner drivers for the Kodak — leveraging the latest in automated image scanning and enhancement technologies.

WSDOM is an open, highly scaleable client/server system that provides downstream input processing for images captured by a production scanning system such as WorldScan. WSDOM is designed to overcome the database contention and network throughput limitations associated with other high-volume image processing systems. In high-volume capture environments, Radian Systems' WorldScan and WSDOM provide the control needed to effectively process images for upload to various retrieval and workflow systems. For more information, please contact Angela Campbell at Radian Systems. 703-317-2026 or by e-mail at acampbell@radsys.com.