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Originating as independent financial advisers, the Totemic Group became the largest commercial debt management company in the UK. Totemic develops its own payment, information and CRM systems, and - through its key PayPlan business - helps over 100,000 people in financial difficulty manage debts every year. Totemic also scores consistently highly in 'Best Places to Work' listings and is an 'Investor In People' accreditation holder.

LEVERAGING AUTOMATION
For its core PayPlan business, Totemic Central Services Ltd (TCS) receives 800-900 pieces of mail correspondence on the quieter days of the week, and 1400-1500 on the busier. The correspondence broadly falls into approximately 12 main types (creditor letters, statements etc.) though when sub-categorised for the purposes of actioning, the number is closer to 25. These types of mail have to be opened, sorted, scanned, processed and actioned every day. Backlogs weren't common, but an ever-present risk. As existing users of Kofax for scanning purposes, Totemic wished to expand that infrastructure and leverage it further to implement a creditor/client correspondence processing system.

The main challenge was to automate as far as possible the process of matching each incoming document to clients and credit agreements, whilst easily and dynamically adjust routing of extracted data to a variety of back-office processes.

DCS worked closely with Totemic for a significant period of detailed process analysis, during which particular attention was paid to the varying availability (and accuracy) of data on any given incoming document.

All significant system elements were already in place (scanners, Kofax Capture/KTM /VRS platform etc) so this project would focus on configuring the Kofax platform and developing custom elements in order to fulfil the specific business logic. The required workflow logic was plotted, allowing for both automated and manually guided lookups from CRM in order to arrive at the closest possible data matches for each incoming correspondence item.

The upgraded solution now searches for information to populate a multitude of principal data fields and verifies the relationships of this data matched with previously stored case/matter correspondence. This has to take into account:

• 140,000 debtors
• 60,000 creditors
• Multiple 'debt accounts' per debtor (from 1.75 million UK debt accounts)
• Erroneous information on the correspondence

Given the vast number of variables and their permutations, one major consideration was user experience. The operating validators now work with uncluttered, user-friendly functions and presentation in order to maximise the benefits of automation. This was accomplished by providing carefully summarised and prioritised information and ready access to interrelated data lookups.

LEARNING ON THE JOB
In order to populate the overall document status, the solution also searches for phrases likely to identify the document as an 'accepted payment offer', for example, or an 'account statement'. A system dictionary manages this and dynamically learns in response to manual input to the correspondence it cannot identify straightaway.

Front-end operators scan sorted categories of correspondence in batches, using separator sheets where necessary (e.g. multipage documents). Back-end validators use the KTM Server to check and correct where necessary, in accordance with the workflow described earlier.

This means that while Totemic's front-end post sorting is in fact a slightly more 'involved' process for the operators concerned, the pay-off arrives at the back-end: once scanned the correspondence takes mere seconds to validate and is automatically passed through to the correct client files, and made immediately available for action/response.

CORRESPONDING BENEFITS
• All incoming correspondence dealt with each day. Backlog risk reduced
• No longer necessary to offshore proportions of the processing
• Estimated project cost recoup within 11 months
• Overall reduction in man-hour and financial costs per client case, as the operational cost of administering cases is significantly reduced
• Post-scanning, documents validated at rate of 2 per minute by operators

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