Our customer, a multi-national company in the Oil and Gas industry sector employs over 100, 000 staff over many countries. The organisation operates a pension scheme for their UK staff which until recently all records were held in either microfilm or paper format. In some cases a member’s records had been duplicated/updated over both formats. Any new correspondence is now scanned and held in a central database.
Ideally the legacy microfilms/paper records should also be digitised; however the estimated fees of over £75K to complete the process could not be justified. We were therefore asked to provide an alternative cost-effective solution for the digital capture of the records.
Our initial task being to identify the records held by the client i.e. creating a catalogue of all records (microfilm and/or paper). After discussion a digital listing of all employees was provided by the customer from which we verified if we had a microfilm/hard copy record for the members contained within. After completion some 16,000 members were identified as having records in one form or another and in a number of cases information has been identified as being held in multiple formats.
The client now has a copy of the completed catalogue and on a weekly basis requests any member files being needed as part of the administration of the scheme. In turn we extract these and scan the contents, combining where appropriate both the microfilm and hard copy files into a single digital file.
Once scanned the records are loaded onto our on-line cloud based solution enabling the end users (often in remote parts of the country) instant access to records 24 hours per day. Password controls restrict unauthorised access to the records.
To summarise the main digital library is used on a day to day basis to manage the everyday running of the scheme.
Any newly requested member files are scanned on-demand which has proven to be a huge success whilst also helping to keep management fees of the fund to a minimum.
