SCANNING THE WAY TO CUSTOMER SUCCESS

27 June 2012

Leeds Building Society is the UK’s 5th largest building society with assets of £9.9 billion, almost 700,000 members and 65 branches in the UK. The Society is always looking to enhance its procedures and systems and a recent business partnership with the Arena Group’s mstore electronic document management (EDM) software and OPEX hardware scanning technology has proved to be a tangibly successful project to match that ethos.

Tim Lancelot of the Arena Group sets the scene regarding the business principles of Arena’s longstanding partnership with the Society: “We have proudly dealt with Leeds Building Society since 2004 delivering projects in harmony with their in - house IT capability to help improve customer service, control of information, cost reduction and compliance. Arena recently deployed a second generation digital mailroom solution which brings together best of breed OPEX hardware in conjunction with Arena’s mstore software enabling fast and accurate processing of high volumes of incoming mail. The Opex hardware and Arena’s mstore software work seamlessly together to give the fastest possible mail bag to desk process with maximum automation. Accuracy and throughput are assured by making integration with Leeds BS core database systems an integral part of the mailroom identification and routing processes. This early control of incoming mail improves customer service by making accurate information available to staff responding to customer queries much earlier than was previously possible. LBS have the peace of mind of knowing that all documents are securely stored and activity audited as required by FSA guidelines. It is this commitment to leading edge efficiency solutions which has helped The Leeds maintain an enviable asset to cost ratio within their sector.”

For the record – in every sense of the word – OPEX is a recognised global technology leader with 40 years experience of high speed mailroom automation and document imaging providing performance enhancing and cost-effective workflow solutions across all sectors. The company prides itself on a totally integrated in-house process through from design, manufacture, installation and maintenance. The DS2200 scanners at the Leeds Building Society are a new generation featuring state–of–the–art document feeders, unique drop and packet feed technologies along with an edge-aligned auto capability and designed to handle virtually any simultaneous document scanning task whether single sheets or stacks of documents, envelopes and small forms and including so-called “messy items” whether fragile, damaged, folded or stapled. Eliminating various manual tasks improves transaction integrity and scans can be viewed in real-time. All of this is within dimensions of 49” x 86” x 32” in the ergonomic workstation mode.

Paul Thompson, Document Services Manager at Leeds Building Society is delighted with the benefits of the Arena and OPEX liaison “We set a three phase plan to test and run the overall electronic capture process and we can already see tangible and significant results of major impact. We have uploaded some 75% of legacy files whilst streamlining the intake of new material which amounts to approximately 5000 units per day. This has been done with minimal prep time and saving the physical transport and damage aspects of hard copies. It is truly fantastic technology with very few issues matched by easy operation and maintenance. I especially like the ability of the system to recognise types of documents. Furthermore it also recognises various optical character systems such as barcodes, OCR and OMR and given that we have something like 700 different types of documents, the potential for fast and smooth processing is enormous. I am confident we will achieve an 18 month return on investment, which represents an outstanding investment in truly moving the envelope you might say!”

For further technology details please contact Arena on 0844 8638000 or visit www.arenagroup.net - Opex are at 0161 776 4033 and www.opex.com