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Kimco Staffing Stays Ahead of the Competition with ABBYY FlexiCapture™
| "The automatic indexing capabilities of FlexiCapture and the ability of branches to see the information have been a huge boon for us. They can send a reference to a hiring authority now where they couldn't before. The security features allow us to ensure that forms are categorized so that branch employees see only appropriate information." - Christine Faubert, Training and Development Manager, Kimco Large staffing firm leverages ABBYY FlexiCapture™ to efficiently manage its lengthy paper-based applications and substantially reduce costs. |
Each day, the offices of Kimco Staffing Services receive thousands of employment applications and job opportunities. In the past, tracking and matching the right people with the right jobs was hampered by the company's manual process. With ABBYY FlexiCapture, Kimco transformed its workflow procedure so that it can spend more time on better matchmaking rather than manual data entry—and realized substantial savings.
Background
Kimco, which focuses on professional services and industrial staffing, receives applications and forms from the 15,000 individuals who visit the company's 24 branch offices each year. The multi-page application packets contain a great deal of information that allows Kimco to appropriately match candidates with jobs. They also represent a headache in terms of data management.
Data entry clerks were spending hundreds of hours manually inputting the information into the company's tracking system, and then alphabetically filing the applications in a parallel paper-based system. "We employ about fifty percent of the people we interview, and we have to hold onto those applications for seven years," said Christine Faubert, Training and Development Manager at the Irvine, Calif.-based company. "There are all sorts of reasons that applications need to be pulled and re-filed—so our staff spends a lot of time on returning documents to the correct files."
Kimco maintained a staff of four full-time data-entry employees, a manager and a file clerk to keep up with the demands of managing its paper-based applications. The company realized it needed to turn to technology to realize a more efficient workflow.
New Project
"On the professional services side, we wanted to allow people to fill in the forms online," said Faubert. "Meanwhile, many of our industrial staff don't type, so we wanted to lower our data entry burden without making them type."
With the help of several team players and close collaboration, the FlexiCapture implementation successfully married several industry-leading technologies into a complete and seamless document processing and archiving workflow.
Dallas, Texas-based Sunset Programming, led by David Wolverton, was in charge of the IMage implementation and image archiving processes. Fremont, Calif.-based ABBYY reseller WiseTrend, led by Ilya Evdokimov, provided implementation services around ABBYY FlexiCapture and redesigned Kimco's forms to optimize recognition of the paper-based forms by the system. Meanwhile, Kimco developed an in-house solution to gather online input from users.
"Kimco's environment, like most other corporate environments of the twentieth century, heavily relied on paper and tedious repetitious manual work," said Ilya Evdokimov, owner of WiseTrend. "With the use of technology, we optimized and automated most of these low-level tasks in order to release employees to concentrate on activities that provided the highest level of value to the organization."
Mission Accomplished
With ABBYY FlexiCapture, Kimco reached its goal of reducing the number of staff handling applications to two employees. Now, the data entry workers prep the paper-based applications by making sure the forms are completely filled out, putting in "scrubber sheets" to separate the forms and then scanning them into FlexiCapture. These individuals are also tasked with auditing paperwork filled out by applicants online for completeness and then feeding it into the company's proprietary application tracking system. "Our forms have 1,000 fields that get recognized," said Faubert. "We have completely eliminated heads-down data entry. What may have taken five minutes of data entry before takes just a few seconds... and the accuracy of the data has improved as well."
Significant Savings
The company estimates that it saved $50,000 annually in wages, paper storage and costs associated with data entry—a figure that will double in the coming year. Additionally, even with a smaller staff, the department will be able to handle twice as many applications a month as it could in the past. In the future, Kimco can leverage FlexiCapture's concurrent network-based licensing to extend the technology to other departments to achieve even greater ROI.
After some research, Kimco decided to invest in a scanning solution that would allow it to store images of its application paperwork rather than the paper itself. The company learned that ABBYY's FlexiCapture would allow it to further streamline its processes by increasing data accuracy and recognition compared to other systems. The company set a goal of reducing its staff to one or two people to handle their applications.
Ease of Data Access
By centralizing applications in a digital system, all of the branch offices can now access stored employment applications to clarify any questions rather than sending a request to have the paper-based form sent from the main office. The system allows the administrator to set access permissions so that branch employees can easily access applications and reference letters, but are blocked from accessing certain forms, such as the IRS I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification).
"The automatic indexing capabilities of FlexiCapture and the ability of branches to see the information have been a huge success for us," said Faubert. "They can send a reference to a hiring authority now where they couldn't before. The security features allow us to categorize forms so that branch employees see only appropriate information."
With strategic use of innovative technology, Kimco Staffing Services is ready to quickly access potential candidates and match them to a suitable job quickly and accurately. "We pride ourselves on being progressive, and ABBYY FlexiCapture lets us continue our trend of being a step ahead of the competition," said Faubert.
Company: Kimco Staffing Services, Inc.
Industry: Professional Staffing
Location: Irvine , CA
Products: ABBYY FlexiCapture
Result: Kimco Staffing Services, which interviews more than 2,000 job seekers each month, needed to streamline its four-person data entry department and cut costs. Using ABBYY FlexiCapture, the company reduced costs by $50,000 in the first year and anticipates doubling that figure over the next year. Storing applications in a digital format has made information readily available to all of its branch offices.
ABBYY USA 880 North McCarthy Blvd., Suite #220 Milpitas, CA 95035, USA Tel +1 408.457.9777 Fax +1 408.457.9778 | Kimco Staffing Services, Inc. 17872 Cowan Avenue Irvine , California 92614 Tel +1 949.752.6996
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