Client	Follett Higher Education Group, Chicago, USA
Project Name	Automation of Accounts Payable processes
Systems Integrator	IKON
Products	PROSAR-AIDA, PROKEY
Publications	Case Study FHEG (PDF)
The Company	Follett Higher Education Group is a college and university bookstore management company that is part of the $2.0 billion Follett Corporation. Follett manages stores on more than 746 nationwide campuses and provide management systems, support services and used textbooks to over 1,800 independently managed bookstores. Stocking over 100,000 titles, Follett is the industry′s largest wholesalers of used books to higher education. In 2004 Follett sold 4.9 million items of clothing and 23.4 million textbooks.
Project description	Beginning in 2004, IKON and Paradatec implemented an automated data capture system for Accounts Payable using Captiva’s InputAccel document imaging platform, Paradatec’s PROSAR-AIDA OCR & ICR technology and interfacing to a Lawson payment system. The following is a summary of the system’s statistics as of 2005. Up to 30,000 pages per day are scanned into the system.   Three scanners are used, connecting to three PROSAR-AIDA systems via InputAccel.   There are a total of eleven different document types identified by PROSAR-AIDA.   More than 30,000 invoice vendors.   Credit memos are also processed.   Vendor numbers are extracted via a sophisticated database lookup that is tolerant to differences in address formats between the vendor database and the invoice vendor address.   In our current phase we are completing a scheme where purchase order numbers are extracted and are compared to items in Follett’s purchase order database (three-way match).   Canadian stores and vendors are also supported.   Routing to the appropriate person (for exceptions or based on the dollar value of an invoice) is automatic, based on the PROSAR-AIDA results file and carried out by another tool.   The entire PROSAR-AIDA OCR process typically takes around 1.5 seconds per page.   The system has been running without interruption since production.
Further Information	Paradatec arranges reference site visits to Follett’s office in Oak Brook, IL (Chicago) upon request. For more information, please contact us at the address below: Paradatec, Inc. P.O. Box 822 Loveland, OH 45140 Phone: 513-583-1382 Fax: 775-908-4145 sales@paradatec.com