Client	TALX Corp., St. Louis (Missouri), USA
Project	Human resource and payroll-related document processing
Products	PROSAR-AIDA
Publications	Success Story TALX (PDF)
The Company	TALX Corp., an Equifax business, is a leading provider of Human Resource and Payroll-related services. TALX replaces slow, paper-based, expensive manual methods so their clients can provide better, faster employee service all while reducing costs. TALX services enable organizations to meet today’s demands for reduced costs and higher service levels. TALX also holds a leadership position in automated employment and income verification as well as unemployment and tax management services. With 9,000 clients, including 3/4 of Fortune 500 companies, TALX focuses on three employment-related areas: hiring, pay reporting, and compliance. Each of these main areas of focus involve a significant volume of paper document handling.
The Challenge	As a successful business, TALX has experienced rapid growth. With a need to process over 3500 different document types and with an overall total of 100,000 incoming document pages on a daily basis, the company is always looking for ways to maximize processing efficiencies on behalf of their clients. To that end, in August 2005 TALX opted to utilize the services of Paradatec, Inc. and the Paradatec PROSAR-AIDA freeform capture solution. “We compared a number of free-form recognition solutions and were most pleased with Paradatec’s fast full-page OCR solution. This solution relies on image analysis and can scale to our needs much better than our text-based methods,” comments Bao Zheng, Senior Architect, TALX Corporation. PROSAR-AIDA is a flexible, customizable, high volume data capture solution that intelligently automates the classification, sorting, separation and data extraction of scanned electronic document images.
Unique Approach	Classifying, sorting and separating the volume and diversity of images managed at TALX made Paradatec’s unique approach to classification and data capture from unstructured documents very appealing to TALX. PROSAR-AIDA is text recognition and analysis software based on artificial intelligence that can ascertain document types and classify images for appropriate routing and archival. The process begins with a high-speed and efficient full-page OCR scan of each image. This first step allows PROSAR-AIDA to search each and every word of every document to discover the document content. 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; an exclusive and vital feature for classifying and extracting data from unstructured documents. For TALX, PROSAR-AIDA was an ideal fit. “With this solution we are able to accurately classify an increased volume of documents with 1/3 of the labor, while minimizing the need for additional resources. This directly benefits our client base and offers improved accuracy,” said Bryan Garcia, VP Technology, TALX Corporation.
Results	Paradatec’s PROSAR-AIDA capture solution provides TALX with significant efficiencies and added solutions for classifying very large quantities of different document types and versions. TALX no longer manually inserts and extracts thousands of separator sheets as part of the scanning process. They no longer need to manually batch documents by type. Paradatec’s PROSAR-AIDA now performs this work with a 97% automation rate (no human intervention) and a 0% rate of error. The bottom line result has been a quick, tangible Return on Investment (ROI) in less than 12 months.