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ABBYY’s FineReader saves G.E.M Associates money and time


G.E.M. Associates is an established Management and Housing Consultancy providing innovative solutions to the public sector, specializing in local government and housing. The services they offer include consultancy, repairs diagnostics, writing policy and procedure manuals, training and online documentation systems.


The Challenge

Whenever G.E.M. Associates has to write a policy, it uses many documents provided by its clients. The documents provide background knowledge and are incorporated in the final product. Many clients only have the documents in paper format. Previously G.E.M had to pay for someone with highly skilled typing abilities to manually retype the documents so that it could be accessible in an electronic format. This was a time consuming and costly effort as some of the documents were as large as 85 pages. Most of the projects need to be completed in a relatively short time frame and retyping the documents to have access to the information, was causing difficulties.

In addition many clients had forms only in paper format and it was very important to retain the original layout as well as be able to use the information. Scanning the document would solve this problem, but then it would not be editable, searchable or changeable. Furthermore, G.E.M. needed to convert Word files to PDF and back as well as to other formats like HTML.

The Solution

After identifying the problems G.E.M realized they needed to have all documents processed by OCR (optical character recognition) software. Many different software possibilities were considered, but in the end ABBYY FineReader was the best option available.

ABBYY FineReader 9.0 Professional Edition delivers superior recognition accuracy and layout retention, even on difficult to read or poor quality documents. FineReader captures and re-creates all content and formatting elements of the originals, including columns, tables, lists and graphics. This feature saved G.E.M Associates many man hours as retyping is something of the past and costs has been reduced. The moment it receives documents from clients, it is processed by ABBYY FineReader 9.0 and is then available in a searchable and editable format.

In addition it is an ideal tool for working with PDF files. With ABBYY’s intelligent recognition technology FineReader accurately converts PDF files. You can simply open and convert any type of PDF into editable formats, modify the content and save it to the supported formats, including searchable PDFs. Furthermore FineReader supports saving or export to a variety of popular file formats including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and .LIT for eBooks. You also have a variety of options when saving to files such as: setting all pages of a multipage document to a specific size, or saving document properties or “meta data” to an output file when saving to DOC, XML, HTML, PDF and LIT formats. This feature is especially important, as G.E.M Associates converts a lot of information from paper format and has to deliver it in HTML format.

The Outcome

Using ABBYY FineReader has made G.E.M Associates a lot more efficient. Since implementing ABBY FineReader the time needed to complete the project has been reduced immensely. In some cases it has reduced the time spent on manual intervention tremendously and instead of up to 4 days, ABBYY FineReader does the job within a couple of hours.

“The accuracy is of the highest quality. This is the reason why I have been using FineReader since ver­ sion 3.0,” says Mr. Eric Sharpe, Director of G.E.M Associates. “We have tried other companies to keep abreast of what is available on the market and make sure we still have the best possible software and we keep coming back to ABBYY FineReader as we haven’t found anything better.”

About G.E.M. Associates

“G.E.M. Associates is an established Management and Housing Consultancy providing innovative solutions primarily to the Public sector throughout the United Kingdom . It offers Consultancy and training services together with on-line policy and procedure guides and project management services covering both IT and non-IT subjects. The Company provides specialist services related to Housing Maintenance, Housing Management, On-line information solutions and bespoke training. We have also provided specialist support to other major consultancies such as Deloitte’s for a range of projects”

Contact G.E.M. Associates

Eric Sharpe

G.E.M. Associates

1 Hall Farm Barns

Walton Road

East Winch

Norfolk

PE32 1HH

Tel: 01553 849989

Mobile : 0780 1908464

Web: http://www.gemassociates.co.uk/