FedEx Builds World's Largest Distributed Imaging Application
Sophia Marchi of Bell & Howell Scanners, left, and Todd
Hollenbeck of FedEx test one of the customized 8000 Series scanners used in the
shipper's massive imaging application.
When air bills absolutely, positively have to be there overnight — or in this case, even faster — FedEx is counting on imaging
technology to do the job.
Launching what is surely the world's largest distributed imaging application, Memphis, TN-based Federal Express (www.fedex.com) is rolling out a
custom-built system that will see more than 900 scanners placed in stations and ramp facilities throughout the world. The system is cutting data capture and
processing time to a matter of hours instead of days.
"This is the first truly worldwide capture system of its kind," says Todd Hollenbeck, managing director, shipment data capture at FedEx Services Corp. "We're
capturing images of air bills around the world, converting them to usable data with ICR technology and archiving the images so they can be easily retrieved for
up to seven years."
Hollenbeck says the system will handle an average of 1.2 million images per day, demanding robust, reliable technologies. The list includes scanners from
Bell & Howell, image processing and toolkit components from Kofax, recognition and document ID technology from Top Image Systems, document
management from Mobius and storage management from Veritas.
Most of FedEx's 5 million daily shipments are fully automated thanks to the company's PowerShip system. Still, more than one million air bills are filled out
by hand each day. FedEx currently ships these non-automated documents to a central processing center in Memphis where some 800,000 to 1 million air
bills are scanned and processed. This approach averages three days, but can take up to six days for exception processing. Hollenbeck says the initial rollout
of the distributed system has proven that processing time has been cut to eight hours.
The new distributed process starts with a mix of flatbed and sheetfed models from Bell & Howell Scanners (www.bhscanners.com), Lincolnwood, IL. The
scanners are configured with Adrenalin boards and VRS image processing technology from Kofax Image Products (www.kofax.com), Irvine, CA.
The front-end combination was crucial because the documents range from originals filled out in different color inks to carbon copies with faint details. The
VRS technology starts with grayscale scans and automatically deskews, crops and thresholds to yield ideal bitonal images suitable for data collection and
archiving.
Other steps were taken to keep things simple and error free. For example, Kofax's imaging toolkit was used to integrate barcode recognition — to capture the
air bill number — and to create a single-button interface with all scan settings pre-set. Bell & Howell customized the hardware accordingly.
"We modified the bezel of our 8000 Series scanners to eliminate all operator settings," says Mandy Chubin, director of marketing worldwide for Bell & Howell
Scanners, Lincolnwood, IL. "We also modified our 500FB flatbed scanners to enable all the VRS processing features."
FedEx plans to install one to two scanners at 850 sites in the U.S. as well as in several hundred international locations with at least 1,200 scanners in all.
Each site will process anywhere from a few hundred images up to 8,000 images per day.
FedEx is using custom-built software to transfer images to its central processing facility in Memphis. From there, recognition technology from Top Image
Systems (www.topimagesystems.com), Tel Aviv, Israel, is applied to automatically recognize document
types and extract data including credit card
numbers as well as sender and recipient
names, addresses and telephone numbers. Images are managed with technology from Mobius Management Systems (www.mobius.com), Rye, NY, and
stored with hierarchical storage management software from Veritas (www.veritas.com), Mountain View, CA.
"The real challenge was handling such a large volume of images day in and day out," says Hollenbeck. "The sheer volume translates to about 120 terabytes of
data that we'll need to have online, continuously available."
In addition to speeding availability of shipping and billing data, the distributed system is also cutting the cost of international operations that formerly relied on
high-volume faxing of air bills as well as commercial invoices, export licenses and other documents involved in international shipping.
"We're eliminating faxing of hundreds of thousands of documents," Hollenbeck says. "Now we can simply transmit higher-quality images, and it has
translated into huge telecom and manpower savings."
The system will also supply more complete data for FedEx's Insight daily tracking service. Insight provides companies with complete manifests of inbound
shipments to improve planning and reporting.
In the planning stages since the Spring of 1999 and approved last year, FedEx's new imaging system is already active in 12 locations in the U.S. and 10 in
Canada. Internationally the system is active in eight countries in Asia, four countries in Latin America and three countries in Europe. Hollenbeck says the
company hopes to have the entire system in operation by next spring.
