Does incoming data make you flinch?

Is your organisation struggling to ensure that a particular business process is compliant with legislative requirements? Has a sudden increase in applications meant that a largely paper-based process is becoming highly inefficient? Does the amount of inbound data mean that important documents are becoming less visible than they should be? If so, you may be interested in a company that was recently introduced to me by its CEO Andrew Anderson.

His company, Celaton, is a UK software company automating inbound information streams which might include customer correspondence, insurance claims, HR documents, legal documents, invoices for Banking and Treasury functions and so on. Documents can be received by post, paper, email, fax, mobile and electronic data streams, and can arrive individually or in bulk. What they have in common is that upon arrival they need to enter a work stream as, say, a customer complaint, an accounts payable document. See here.

When Celaton is introduced to a business, it is often positioned as a scanning, data capture or document management company as its products inStream extracts value from documents and manages them into the correct work streams in as automated a way as possible. Anderson explains that when he says "automated", he means no human intervention, but clearly if something can't be automated then inStream can also work with human intervention. For example, if a document comes in as an invoice but the system can't identify the right line of business stream to put it in, then a person needs to work it out and then click a button to move it into the right work stream. The system has its own AI engine and learns from each human intervention so that if the same problem is encountered again, it can be automated without requiring human intervention.

Customers commend high measurable returns
Gullivers Travels Associates (now part of Kuoni) describes itself as the largest supplier of global tourism products to the travel industry. GTA had 62 Accounts Payable staff working with a three month backlog of invoices. It introduced inStream to process invoices so that work could be shifted to two people in London and 40 in Delhi. Once the process was stable, inStream's learning capability was switched on and after four months the number of staff in Delhi has been reduced to 10.

Another customer is Carphone Warehouse which was challenged by the processing of cashback redemptions - this is an area that was the subject of an Ofcom investigation. In essence Celaton took over a manual process at Carphone Warehouse, which required customers to provide three mobile phone bills and a voucher to get the cash.

Initially Celaton integrated its solution with the company's back office ERP system so that quick checks could be made to validate that each redemption claim was being made by a genuine customer, whose payment record gave them eligibility. This validation sequence has now been reduced to a seven day process and has saved Carphone Warehouse a lot of money because originally the mobile communications retailer was using a call centre in South Africa to handle 5,000 calls a day from customers asking if their claim had come through. Now inStream simply sends a text as soon as the claim is received and validated. In order to do this it has integrated with two ERP systems, a CRM system and a billing system and is able to update address information in those systems and link the relevant documents to the correct record in the ERP system.