Cargill Foods beefs up employeesafety and product quality with formprocessing software
David Iturri, IT project leader Cargill Foods, Toronto Over the years, Cargill Foods has been strongly committed to providing a safe work environment for its employees. In order to maintain these high standards, managers continually collect information and ideas that will help lead to improvements in these area. One way that Cargill gathers information is by asking employees to fill out forms. In the past, data on these forms was manually typed into a database, which proved to be time-consuming and inefficient for thorough data analysis. Charged with the task of finding a better form solution, David Iturri, IT project leader at Cargill Foods, Toronto, carefully compared a variety of products. After putting several finalists to the test, Iturri selected ABBYY FormReader®. Iturri said it was surprisingly easy to set up the new form processing system. In the Safety department, IT administrators installed FormReader, created aform template, established rules, structured the database, and trained the staff, completing the entire implementation in less than seven days. In addition to using the new technology to process safety forms, Cargill is implementing FormReader in the Quality Assurance department. Cargill also plans to set up FormReader in its Human Resource department for processing a variety of employee forms, such as vacation requests, employee emergency contacts, and employment applications. Compared to manual data entry, FormReader's automated system is much faster and more accurate. Based on ABBYY's internal tests, FormReader 4.1 is 10 times faster than manual data entry and is 99.5% accurate. Using FormReader, a single computer, and a scanner, Cargill is able to process 800 Safety Observation Cards in less than an hour, and automatically export this information to a database with the click of a single button. This saves the company significant labor costs and saves administrators from tedious data entry, giving them time for more important tasks. In addition, FormReader organizes and presents the data in a way that corresponds with the structure of Cargill's Microsoft Access database, which is created with the company's business logic in mind. As a result, Cargill managers can more easily analyze the information and interpret the data. Now the Safety department is able to better identify what could cause injuries or accidents so the company can remove the hazards and change work processes that lead to injuries. Likewise, FormReader will save hundreds of hours of labor that's required to manually process the extensive number of Quality Assurance forms-approximately 400 forms every month. Once the new form processing system is in place, the QA managers will have more data intelligence, enabling them to be more reactive to complaints and problems. By analyzing data collected on the Claims Investigation form, for example, Cargill will be able to determine what needs to be fixed. This means FormReader will help the company reduce the amount of returned product, a valuable ROI. Cargill Foods is a leading processor and wholesale distributor of meat, cereal, coffee, chocolate and other foods supplied to retailers throughout North America and many countries worldwide. The company is a division of Cargill, Incorporated, a $51 billion-dollar enterprise with 97,000 employees in 59 countries. |
There are so many opportunities to use the FormReader technology. We see many areas throughout the company where FormReader could provide significant advantages - not just in this facility but also in other divisions worldwide. I will definitely recommend it to Cargill IT managers. FormReader is friendly, accurate and saves time- its better than other form processing solutions in many regards."