Business Communication and Document Services Specialist

Posted by Encora on Aug 17, 2021 7:38:29 AM
With the PDF Review Automation framework, NCP Solutions have reduced costs as they no longer have to hire a data validation support team at the end of each year.

Topics: HiTech, Product Engineering & Development, Quality Engineering, Innovation Ideation

Industry Context

The managed application and network services industry is handling increasingly large amounts of sensitive client data. There is a business-critical need to ensure clean, secure databases and also automate the data validation process for increased accuracy and greater agility.   

Manually verifying sensitive client data between hundreds of thousands of printed documents is no longer an option as manual data verification is complex, time-consuming, costly, and vulnerable to human error.

Industry Context

Client Challenge

For more than 45 years, NCP Solutions has delivered digital and traditional business communication services. They develop and implement advanced output systems, secure workflows, and quality processes to carry out services like transactional communications, marketing communications, electronic document services, and mail services for clients in multiple industries, namely financial services, healthcare, insurance, and telecommunications.

NCP Solutions needed to build an automation framework that not only read and extracted unstructured data from various kinds of client PDF files but also validated data between them. They required this automation framework to streamline the resource-intensive data validation process and reduce errors for end-of-year billing statements and forms processing.  

Client Challenge-2

Encora’s Approach

Encora’s QA engineers analyzed NCP’s challenges to propose and implement the PDF Review Automation framework, a program that reads original PDF files to extract and verify the data within.  

  • Encora met regularly with the client and stakeholders to learn about their automation needs, understand NCP’s system, and use innovation ideation to propose an improved solution, the automation framework
  • The product engineering and development task was to create a program that reads the original client data PDF file, apply data transformation rules to generate data records, apply NCP’s formulas and business rules, generate a virtual PDF file, and compare the generated PDF with the real PDF to detect discrepancies and report them

To process the hundreds of thousands of PDF files, Encora’s QA engineers developed a framework that translates plain text and binary languages into XML and detects inconsistencies between one format and the other. 

To ensure the quality of the framework, Encora conducted quality assurance testing, running unit, integration, and end-user tests.  

NCP Solutions

Results

With the PDF Review Automation framework, NCP Solutions have reduced costs as they no longer have to hire a data validation support team at the end of each year. 

By automating processes, they have also eliminated human error often caused by fatigue or distraction during manual, visual data verification. 

Data verifications that once took days or weeks are now completed in a matter of minutes or hours as NCP Solutions can review over 35,000 records in less than an hour. 

ncp - results-min
NCP Solutions study graph 1

Records Verification Speed

NCP Solutions study graph 2

Test Cases Performed