Sandwell MBC was the first council to implement eCAPTURE. Within 6 weeks, the council had ceased using 6 agency staff and eliminated overtime. Within 3 months, it had redeployed 5 more staff away from claims processing into other priorities. After 12 months, after its first Subsidy Review, the council was so confident in the accuracy of data that it moved to sample checking only, releasing two more Review staff for other priorities. After two years, the council hired four new assessor trainees; for the first time ever, all the trainees passed their probation period at the first attempt, were processing an average of 12 new claims per day each – and getting them right first time.

Claims submitted in web forms are routed direct to Govtech’s processing centre in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, via a secure communications network provided as part of the service. Claim content is routed through eCAPTURE where this is validated, matched and compared to existing claim data in the benefits system. Any errors, omissions or anomalies are noted. Claims are then routed to the council and loaded into the benefit system using the benefits system vendor’s APIs. No robotics is involved. A PDF rendition of the claim is auto-indexed into an appropriate work queue in the document management system. When an assessor retrieves the document and looks in the Benefit system, the claim is present and ready for immediate assessment. The document rendition contains appropriate information, such as reference numbers, that have been drawn from existing records and draws the assessor’s attention to anything of significance that eCAPTURE has noted about the claim. Assessors deal with any such anomalies, verify incomes and assess the claim.

Simple and non-disruptive to deploy, eCAPTURE Benefits is a service with no software to buy or new technology to master. It presents claims to assessors in the normal way but with most of the time consuming work already done. eCAPTURE can be supplied with its own suite of web forms or it can accept claim content from forms supplied by or built in any vendor’s platform, including IEG4, Victoria Forms, Granicus-Firmstep, Team Netsol, etc. eCAPTURE fully integrates with the NEC Revenues & Benefits, Capita and Civica benefit systems and with any mainstream document management system.

eCAPTURE can accept content in many formats, including:

• Xml
• Excel, CSV, etc
• Structured emails, PDF forms, etc
• Scanned images of structured forms

Can it read handwriting and/or text?

eCAPTURE was originally designed and developed for this and can still be supplied with an ICR/OCR capture service for structured and semi-structured documents, with a 100% content capture guarantee. If our technology cannot read something that is visible to the human eye, that’s our problem, not yours. False positives are eliminated with business rules. Every image from which we capture content is subjected to 5 separate quality checks before content is transformed into structured xml, released and loaded into business processing systems.

Over the last 15 years, data has been captured from millions of:

• Scanned images of 48-page handwritten-completed Benefit application forms
• Semi-structured PDF LAIDs and LACIs
• Concessionary Travel Pass applications and renewal forms
• Blue Badge applications
• Applications for statutory redundancy entitlements

As well as councils, companies and organisations such as PwC, KPMG, CGI, Serco, Sopra Steria, IBM, NEC Revenues & Benefits (previously known as Northgate), Capita and The Department for Business have deployed Govtech’s capture services to meet the needs of their clients.

If you have a legacy image capture requirement, contact us for an informal discussion.

eCAPTURE Benefits and webCAPTURE Revenues are hosted services, so you pay an initial set-up fee and then an annual service fee determined by the scope of services and/or web forms you require, the size of your organisation and/or the expected volume of traffic you receive.

Our standard pricing for local authorities is listed on the Digital Marketplace but, whatever fees you incur, we expect these to be substantially less than the savings you derive from automation. Govtech’s automation rates are stable and predictable; we monitor them and, as part of a cycle of continuous improvement, we share them with customers so that they can compare their performance with their peers.

This means that we can accurately predict what your savings will be. So, before you look at prices, why not ask us to do that by requesting a business case?