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| Captovation
Capture
Overview
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New
Imaging System Streamlines School’s Donor St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota is a privately funded, accredited residential facility that provides a well-rounded educational and spiritual curriculum for the Lakota (Sioux) children from various tribes in South Dakota. All financial assistance for the 200 students comes from private donors. Donor cards are sent to people all around the United States to solicit funds for the school. When St. Joseph’s receives a donor
card, a person takes the card and scans it.
Each donor card contains a unique donor number consisting of 24 digits.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to automatically read the number
from the card and enter it into an AS/400 program. St. Joseph’s previous system used
proprietary AS/400 equipment, which was out-dated and not Y2K compliant.
Furthermore, due to the age of the scanning hardware, the equipment was
becoming difficult to service. A
PC-based system would provide the flexibility to continue to enhance the system
in the future. So, they contacted
Active Data Systems of Sioux Falls SD, an Imaging Systems reseller that
partnered with Captovation of Minneapolis, MN. Captovation was asked to design and
develop the new PC-based solution. The
new Donor CardScan program scans using a Canon DR-3020 scanner and uses IBM’s
Client Access 5250 emulator program to access St. Joseph’s donor database on
their AS/400. Captovation wrote a
custom Visual Basic
script that allows the user to control the scanning program from within the
AS/400 session. This allows the
user to keep his/her fingers on the keyboard.
The script instructs the program to scan a donor card and retrieve the
donor number from the Donor CardScan program, as well as automatically
populating it into the correct mainframe screen. Since the donor number is always
located at the bottom of a donor card and the card size varied, the Pixel
Translations’ PixTools/EZ
scanning tool-kit was integrated to ensure proper end-of-page detection.
The image needed to be representative of the actual size of the donor
card. This feature in the Pixel
toolkit, coupled with an ISIS driver has increased the efficiency and overall
speed of processing the donor cards since only the bottom portion of the donor
card needs to have Optical Character Recognition performed on it.
The OCR process happens so quickly that the user does not even realize
it. The new Y2K compliant, PC-based system eliminated the cost of maintaining old equipment and helped to better streamline the data entry process. Compared to the old system, OCR accuracy has increased 25%. In addition, the users enjoy working within the new user interface that consists of integrated data entry and image display.
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