Every time you board a train you get a ticket. And so do the tens of thousands of people that ride Amtrak's 250 East Coast trains every day. You probably never think about what happens to your ticket once the conductor collects it. Amtrak does.
Tickets have to be processed, if Amtrak want to collect the revenue. "The sooner we process the tickets, the sooner we get paid for them," says Peter Blum, Amtrak's senior analyst-accounting projects. "When tickets are purchased on credit cards we don't see the money until we have proof that the ticket has been used.
"Once the ticket is processed, Amtrak collects the money the credit card companies owe them. Because Amtrak is government subsidized, they need the money quickly for accounting purposes. Tickets are also used for market research."
The next time you ride an Amtrak train, watch the conductor after your ticket is collected. They're batched according to ticket type. Some are Amtrak tickets. Some are from an independent ticketing service. Some are from travel agents. The tickets are bundled in rubber bands and put in big envelopes with the train's number.
When the envelopes arrive at the Amtrak office two people sift through them and make sure they're all face up for scanning.
They are then taken to the scan-optics (East Hartford, CT 860-289-6001) 9000 scanner with built-in OCR. One person feeds the scanner. The tickets are automatically batched by the scanner according to the train number. Blank tickets are used as batch separators. The train number is printed in a font recognizable by the scanner. This becomes a multi-TIFF image of all the tickets for one train. The whole image can be up to 6 MB.
To improve productivity, Amtrak is using Textware's (Park City, UT 801-645-9600) FormWare software to process the 60,000 tickets that come into their Philadelphia office every day.
Their hardware includes several Compaq (Houston, TX281-370-0670) dual Pentium MB Proliance 5000 workstations with 200 MB of storage. The 20" monitors come from Viewsonic (Walnut, CA 909-869-7676) and Cornerstone Imaging (San Jose, CA 408-435-8900).
FormWare's JobFlow, for workflow, automatically routes the images to the post recognition data entry operators. They then go to an IBM ImagePlus system to be stored on an IBM mainframe for customer service, credit card inquiries etc.
"JobFlow also has priority control features which let us view a summary of all jobs in process," says Blum. "We can assign a priority number which pushes up a batch to be processed or changes to a different server quickly."
Textware has a very strong post recognition process that includes powerful reject repair, image data entry, key verification and data validation. These processes can be done on data singled out as vital information. The user sets these parameters in the software.
"We run the scan-optics OCR engine at a 95% confidence level," says Blum. "This is very high because we only read the train number, a single number field."
Problems include the ticket numbers that are too light to be recognized and numbers that have been covered over with pen by a sales clerk. Tickets with unrecognizable train numbers are routed for to workstations for reject repair or key entry.
A data entry person keys from image to verify the train number. FormWare compares the characters being keyed to the data previously captured. It simultaneously matches the corrections to a master database of tickets downloaded from the mainframe and makes the changes. This happens instantly as the data entry person rekeys the fields.
This simultaneous verification of data is very important because the data entry person never takes their eyes off the screen. This increases productivity and is physically less strenuous.
"With our old system we had three key entry people," says Blum. "We've reduced that to one. Our error rate is now less than 1%. We were also using three old Hybrid scanners which needed up to eight passes to read the data. Now we have one scanner that can scan and read the tickets with only three passes.
"TextWare was recommended to us by scan-optics because their system is robust and uses an open architecture," he continues. "We've seen a return on the investment in under a year."
