Major Swiss financial institute implements PDF/A-conforming long-term archive

Application requirements

A major Swiss financial institute commissioned DTI Management AG to build a document processing system that captures incoming fax and e-mail messages, converts them to digital documents, performs an OCR/ICR recognition on the output format, categorizes them, extracts useful information, validates them and finally forwards them to numerous peripheral systems. Documents being sent to the long-term archive will only be accepted if they conform to the ISO standard for long-term archiving, PDF/A. A suitable software needed to be found for the conversion from PDF to PDF/A, and for verifying the outputs, i.e. if the documents are PDF/A-conforming. The software should be stable, high-performing, work in the background, and also require a minimum of resources. The easy integration of the Swiss software provider’s product, the uncomplicated project development, the attractive cost-benefit ratio and the high quality of the output convinced DTI Management AG to select the 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter from PDF Tools AG.

Customer benefits

Before the project commenced, the end-customer manually processed all faxes and e-mails. Faxes were received as paper printouts and e-mails were also printed out. The corresponding data for these documents was manually entered in the respective system, and finally the paper faxes and e-mails were physically stored in the archive. With the new solution, incoming faxes and e-mails are sent to a mailbox, OCR-recognition is performed on every page, and the documents are classified. Data is automatically extracted and the documents are verified for PDF/A-conformance. Finally, the extracted data is forwarded to other systems and the PDF/A documents are sent to the digital long-term archive. The financial institute now has an efficient, automatic document administration system at their disposal, drastically reducing their administrative effort. Within the process, the 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter ensures that the archived documents conform to the PDF/A standard. This guarantees that compliance requirements are adhered to and that the archived documents will be accessible in the long-term.

Implementation

The processing solution is based on eFlow from TiS, a document processing software that supports the implementation of customer-specific workflows. The 3-Heights® PDF to PDF/A Converter was embedded in the solution. Additionally, a dedicated web interface was developed that allows access to all data during the processing. An archiving service was also realized to export the PDF/A-conforming documents into the customer archive.