The problem
Juan Celaya is President & CEO of COMPUDATA International (CDI) – although as he puts it, “We’re not too big on titles around here. We focus on getting the job done.” And this job was a big one. A very large, global agro-chemicals company had hired CDI to set up an integrated system for document scanning and conversion to multi-page searchable PDF files. But that’s not all. The other half of the project involved converting nearly 5 million legacy TIFF images into multi-page searchable PDF documents. The sheer volume combined with the age of the files made this a mammoth job. “I was worried about the TIFF images,” admits Richard King, Senior Consultant at CDI. “No one could be sure what difficulties they might contain.”

The solution
“Whenever we do a job we first build a similar environment in-house for preliminary tests,” explains Juan. “It’s part of our methodology.” Once this was completed, Richard spent a week at the client’s premises. “It was early March 2007,” he recounts. “I was on-site for five days to help install the components and get the system going.” Two separate servers were installed. One was a Kofax system in which CDI had integrated IRISPdf for Ascent Capture. “At the same time we added another IRISPdf Server.” Its job was to process the 4.7 million TIFF pages.

The result
Over the summer, CDI’s client processed the backlog of TIFF pages. How did the system perform? “I must say it went amazingly smoothly,” says Richard. “They finished the major part of the job in August. There were only 8,000 items with errors that needed to be cleaned up. Considering there were 4.7 million pages, it could have been a lot worse.” “That means only 0.17 percent were exceptions,” Juan points out. “We were a little surprised at how well it went. All the credit goes to I.R.I.S. It performed as expected.” As to the client’s ongoing scanning and processing activities, Richard adds that the I.R.I.S. component integrated seamlessly into Kofax. “From a support standpoint I haven’t had any issues at all.”

The future
CDI is enthusiastic about developing new markets using I.R.I.S. products. One promising area is the health industry. “Their images are stored in coloured TIFF files,” Juan explains. “Using IRISPdf 6 Server with iHQC® (Intelligent High Quality Compression) we will be able to help customers reduce the size of images and still maintain high quality, which is essential for medical applications.”

About COMPU-DATA International
Founded in 1988, COMPU-DATA International (CDI) is a leading provider and integrator of content integration and knowledge preservation solutions. Based in Texas, CDI serves clients across the United States. Its products and technologies offer highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text-based files in multiple languages, as well as video, image and audio assets.

About I.R.I.S.
Image Recognition Integrated Systems (I.R.I.S.) was founded in 1987. A leader in the “document-to-knowledge” market, it provides extremely high-quality solutions for converting paper documents into electronic formats for archiving, storing, managing and sharing digital information. With a revenue in 2005 of €73.9 million. I.R.I.S. employs 300 people at five sites: Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels (Belgium), Orly (France), Luxembourg and Delray Beach (USA).