Case Studies
Business Forms
Reforming Forms Improves Bank Productivity
The Situation
At Lake City Bank in Warsaw, Indiana, it wasn’t just that read rates were bad; it was that they were pretty much non-existent.
The read rate is the percent of transaction slips that can be read by a bank’s computer system, so they’re like a productivity index. The higher the read rate, the lower your operational costs and the less the total time spent.
First, transaction slips are scanned; then the image is analyzed and read by a process called Courtesy Amount Recognition, or CAR, that converts the handwritten numeric amounts in the scans into computer-usable data.
For the CAR software to figure out and convert handwritten numbers, it first has to find them…then drop out the background, separate the digits from one another and, finally identify them. It’s that first step that was giving Lake City Bank fits.
Looking for a form with the right qualities for the scanner and, ultimately, for the CAR software, banks tend to go to their printer and say, “We’re getting into imaging. Can you provide us with the right form?”—and the printer hands them a generic one that may or may not be what they need. Not the case at Superior Business Solutions.
The Superior Business Solution
Superior’s Scott Zanoni set to work devising new forms that took into account all the main factors affecting readability. The point was to design a form that both met LCB’s needs and adhered to CAR requirements.
A period of development followed, as Superior worked with LCB to construct and refine cash out, counter deposit, savings withdrawal, general ledger debit, and general ledger credit forms. The quality of that development process impressed Becky Siery, Project Manager for Lake City Bank.
The Result
“Superior took the hassle right out of the process of constructing the CAR documents. We could tell Scott what we needed, and he provided it. We didn’t have to become forms experts!” When LCB and Superior had arrived at satisfactory forms, a controlled, three-day document test was performed using 5,000 of each form in special runs.
The average overall read rate of amounts on LCB’s current vendor’s forms was 42.5%; on Superior’s, 70.3%. The average overall read rate of account numbers on the current vendor’s forms was 32.6%; on Superior’s, 58.1%. In some areas—for example, General Ledger Debit slip amounts—Superior’s rate was 400% higher than that of the other vendor’s.
“The read rates may not sound all that high,” says Becky, “but, remember, this was a test run and our people had not been trained [how to complete forms in a way that maximizes read rates]. With training the rates will go much, much higher.
“Any financial institution that’s using CAR needs CAR-friendly documents,” continues Becky. “Superior makes it easy and slick. They made my job a lot easier, and saved us all a lot of time and effort.”
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