Fairfax Addresses Forms, Faxes and Remittances

by Adam Throne

The use of electronic payments may be growing, but so, too, is the use of checks. Last year, 100 million consumer bills were paid electronically each month, according to the Chicago consulting firm Treasury Strategies. While this figure sounds impressive, the other 95 percent - a whopping 1.6 billion bills each month - were paid with conventional paper-based methods.

"We believe in a hybrid world with both electronic and conventional payments, but more transactions come in through paper," says Steve Chahal, vice president of technology at Fairfax Imaging, Chantilly, VA. To this end, Fairfax has recently added remittance processing to its suite of high-volume forms and order automation technologies.

"Checks and forms usually don't go together, and there's been a lack of technology to handle both," says Chahal, adding that insurance, banking and tax-related forms are often accompanied by checks. "Handling them together cuts processing time because you're not sending forms and checks to separate systems; it's faster and easier to clear up discrepancies and balance payments."

Quick Module's Quick Capture module incorporates specialized character amount recognition (CAR), legal amount recognition (LAR) and MICR (magnetic ink) recognition technologies to process checks. The CAR/LAR recognition technologies can automate up to 80 percent of checks. A Quick Balance module allows operators to quickly handle exceptions and low-confidence recognition results in order to reconcile balances.

Fairfax's remittance technology processes up to 110 remittances per minute, supporting demands of up to 100,000 transactions per day. The check images and data can be exported to databases and made Web accessible for customer service.

Customers, including ING Bank, Toronto, and the District of Columbia Department of Taxation and Revenue are evaluating the company's check automation module, according to Fairfax.

In addition to its remittance processing technology, Fairfax also specializes in processing faxed-in forms and orders, a feature that is particularly attractive in supply chain and business-to-business applications. Among the customers making use of this technology is Merck-Medco, of Willingboro, NJ. The company recently installed Quick Modules to process faxed-in prescription forms from physicians' offices.

"The ultimate goal of the system is to route each prescription form to the appropriate supporting applications and the Merck-Medco mail pharmacy," Robert Sendewicz, the company's senior manager, e-commerce and autofax, said in an email interview. "The Quick Modules software is used to read combinations of bar-coded data, pre-printed data and hand-written data on each prescription fax form.

Merck-Medco receives about 20,000 faxed-in prescriptions per day. That's about 10 percent of all orders, and the use of the fax channel has more than doubled in the last year, according to Sendewicz. These images are now routed to a Quick Modules recognition server, which has been trained to handle approximately 25 templated fax forms. The data extracted is stored in the Merck-Medco database and used for the routing and processing of each form.

With the Quick Modules system in place, manual data entry is now the exception rather than the rule for Merck-Medco. "The ability to have OCR data from the prescription fax forms has been a major factor in reducing the amount of time required to enter information into Merck-Medco's pharmacy systems," Sendewicz stated.

Quick Modules competes with data capture systems from vendors including Captiva (www.captivasoftware.com), San Diego, CA, and Recognition Research Inc. (www.rrinc.com), Blacksburg, VA. Captiva's FormWare software supports high-volume processing of paper, faxes and Web-submitted forms. RRI's FormWorks supports paper-, fax-, Web- and electronic data interchange-based input streams. While Fairfax does not address Web-based forms, Quick Modules is the only one of these products to integrate remittance processing.

Quick Modules starts at $30,000 for a basic system capable of handling 10,000 forms per day. The optional Quick Capture (remittance) and Quick Balance modules are each priced at $13,500.