The Digital Personnel File

A personnel file can include a great variety of documents. Neither layout nor content are standardized. The relevant documents are defined by employment law. The employer has to archive a couple of these documents. Document records stored in an employee personnel file can include such things as:

Employment specific documents	Employment applications Reference Letters School Transcripts Resumes ...
Insurance and Benefits documents	Health Insurance Applications Retirement Plan Elections Cafeteria Benefit Elections Income Tax Documents Disability Claims ...
Copies of official documents	Birth Certificates (dependents) Marriage Certificates Employer appraisals/reviews ...
Miscellaneous documents	Awards Training Certifications Correspondences Certificates of professional development Disciplinary documentation ...

In every case this information requires strict confidentiality. This data privacy requirement includes not only careful attention to securing information from the outside world, but also internally limiting access to authorized employees.

The Paper-Based System

According to the Gartner Group, increased labour costs due to paper document mismanagement in many cases exceeds 30%. Misplaced or lost files and documents, single-threaded access to files and documents (e.g. only one individual able to access a file at one time), and physical document travel time are just a few of the identifiable inefficiencies which translate into tangible, increased costs in a paper-based archival system. Other costs can include: physical decay of paper-based records, lack of a disaster recovery possibility, poorly enforced data privacy policies, and missed deadlines.

The Digital Personnel file

A centralized, digital document archival and management solution can be an effective way for an organization to dramatically lower both the tangible and intangible costs of personnel file administration.

Disaster recovery and backup of digital information eliminates the potential costs of lost or misplaced files, and mutilated or decaying paper records. Multi-user ability to access files concurrently virtually eliminates the costs of retrieval and physical document travel time. Software-based security policy enforcement greatly reduces the risk of loss of sensitive information and helps to ensure data privacy.

Historically, implementing a digital personnel file system has been a labour intensive process. Electronic documents need to be classified by type, page boundaries of multipage documents need to be established, and metadata or index information describing each document must be captured.

In many cases, these up front labour requirements can make the implementation process cumbersome, costly, and daunting.

The Solution

PROSAR-AIDA (Artificial Intelligence for Document Analysis) from Paradatec, greatly streamlines and reduces the cost and drudgery of manual document classification and data extraction from both formatted and freeform (documents with no predictable format or form) documents.

PROSAR-AIDA is taught about the general properties of all document types it will encounter. As a scanned image is processed, a high speed, millisecond-efficient full page OCR is performed. This first step allows PROSAR-AIDA to discover the general properties of each document image as it is processed in much the same way that a human being would. Each and every word and character is evaluated and compared to the known properties of each document type.

Once the document classification step is completed, the data extraction process begins in much the same way. A high speed, full page OCR is performed in milliseconds on each and every image. Now, because the document type is known, it is a simple process for the software to discover the required index values and capture them using a rules-based approach unique to each document type.

The establishment of the general document properties and rules for classification and data extraction is done through a friendly graphical user interface. No scripting or programming background is required.

PROSAR-AIDA an PROKEY within a workflow

In the case that an exception occurs (e.g. broken business rules and low confidence OCRrecognition), Paradatec’s PROKEY image-assisted exception processing module provides a highly intuitive and efficient interface for exception handling.

Summary

Implementation of a digital personnel file system as part of a larger content management implementation or by itself can yield tremendous benefits to an organization. The inclusion of Paradatec’s PROSAR-AIDA Classification and Data Extraction process should be a key part of any such initiative.

PROSAR-AIDA’s unique process of discovery is very different from the typical templatebased solution. With other solutions, document content is expected and assumed to always appear in the same geographical areas on a document. This approach often proves to be extremely inefficient and can require a great deal of administrative overhead in order to keep up with changing document version and templates.

A significant advantage of PROSAR-AIDA’s document content discovery method is its ability to process a virtually unlimited number of versions and formats of particular document types. This is an exclusive and vital feature for classifying and extracting data from the types of unstructured documents typically found in a personnel file.

References

Paradatec and IBM GS have teamed together to implement a number of “digital personnel file” solutions across Europe.

Client	Large Telecommunications Services Organization
Goals	Digitize paper-based personnel documents, reduce costs and increase overall HR efficiency.
Challenge	530 document types and 48 Million pages of personnel records stored in 77 different locations.
Solution	Documents are prepared and scanned. PROSAR-AIDA establishes document boundaries (first and last pages) and classifies each document as one of 530 possible types. Relevant data (dates, IDs) is captured from the documents. The small number of exceptions are efficiently handled using the Paradatec PROKEY image-assisted exception processing module.
Result	Customized access rights ensure data privacy and compliance with confidentiality regulations. Disaster recovery is now a possibility and costs have been reduced dramatically.
Client	Leading European Information Technology Company
Goals	Reduce the time-consuming inefficiencies inherent in a paper-based personnel file system. These included: misplaced files and documents, single-threaded document review limitations, and difficult to manage data privacy policies.
Challenge	Rationalize and eliminate old, unnecessary and redundant files and documentation from 150,000 personnel files located in various locations while classifying valid document types and extracting index information from each.
Solution	Documents are prepared and scanned. PROSAR-AIDA classifies each document and establishes page boundaries. Index information or metadata is extracted from each critical document. PROKEY exception processing software provides an image-assisted interface for the elimination of redundancies and adjudication of other exceptions.
Result	50,000 critical personnel files have been digitized allowing companywide, simultaneous, secure and direct access. Human Resource decisions can now be made quicker all while corresponding administrative costs have been reduced significantly.