In Romania, every branch of the bank generated every day of operational activity a growing volume of physical documents that had to be filed under the fileplan approved by the bank. The documents were sent by courier to headquarter, from where they were taken over by an external specialist to be stored in an approved warehouse.

When it was necessary to consult any of the archived documents, the internal applicant had to make a request to Logistics / Operations department who had to forward it to the external archiving service provider.

The time for a document to be available was high, as there were no optimization solutions, and each request included the same steps: removing the box from the warehouse which contained the document and ship it by courier. Moreover, the costs for making the document available were also high, as they had not only the archiving service provider costs, but also the delivery expenses.

The high costs included also the price for archive storage, as its volume was montly increasing and they had to store it on long term. Handling physical documents included the risk of loss or damage and the impact is huge as these were the original documents.

The documents content could not be used in business applications within the bank, even if certain information would have accelerated and optimized specific processes.

After analyzing the existing situation of bank’s business problems and challenges in Romania, Star Storage offered a flexible solution for implementing a centralized electronic archive, easy to use and accessible for all employees of the bank.

Our solution for document data capture (provided by our StarCapture product) and electronic archive management (SEAL product) allows the conversion of physical documents through scanning, indexing and adding information in accordance with the bank’s fileplan, the processing being conducted under a centralized department of Operations Division, equipped with the necessary devices and specialized in such operations.

After introducing the documents in the archive, they can be accessed by users from the bank through a flexible web-based interface, on access rights on roles and categories of documents.

The number of users was initially 1.500 and after 1 year it was extended to other departments within the bank, so there was need for additional 300 users. At this time the total number of users of the electronic archive solution is 1,800.

The technologies included in the solution provided by Star Storage are own intelectual property software products, recognized and appreciated both national and international market:

• SEAL (Secure Electronic Archive Library) is an integrated system for Enterprise Unified Archive (Unified Content Repository), it integrates transparently with document data capture application (StarCapture) and includes unique facilities in Romania for retrieval and access to information based on associated metadata.
• StarCapture is a platform that transforms paper documents into electronic and extract useful information, allowing quick access and capitalization across the organization, reducing the storage costs and usege of paper documents.

The solution was quickly accepted and adopted by users, right after implementation. Friendly and intuitive interface, that does not require dedicated training, helped bank employees to use the new solution from day one.

The deadline for making available a document has decreased from several hours to several seconds and operational efficiency has increased considerably.

Costs for original documents requests have also been reduced substantially as there are required only the ones necessary in court, the rest can always be consulted electronically.

The system uses the CMIS standard that allows easy integration with systems BPM / ERP / CRM / Portal / etc and so stored content is available to users even in applications that they already use, increasing the value of their business.

Annual cost savings were achieved by:

• Avoid consultation of physical documents directly from the archive;
• Avoid duplicating documents;
• Quick time for necessary changes in the application by business users, without expensive IT resources or external specialized consultants
• very short ROI compared to other archiving platforms: 2 years compared to 5 (other offers);
• great TCO: 30% per year compared to other competitive offers for archiving platforms.

Compliance and security benefits:

• backup of all documents in accordance with the National Bank of Romania regulations;
• instantly respond to any audit by establishing and making available special secure document collections consist of ad hoc, based on selective search and with limited time for consultation;
• risks diminished - it provides audit for all system access and a complex security plan to ensure access to documents only according to allocated rights.