ePC delivers benefits to educational customer with OpenText partnership

Last year, we announced that we had joined the OpenText Global Partner Program, becoming an OpenText OEM partner.

To mark the occasion, we sat down with OpenText to discuss how our customers are benefiting from OpenText technology.

The following article is available to download or read on the OpenText website.

IT consultancy helps lower costs, reduce risk and improve efficiency for its customers with LiquidOffice and TeleForm, part of the OpenText Intelligent Forms Automation suite.

ePC is a market leading IT consultancy specialising in the development of bespoke workflow and data capture solutions. Founded in 2004, its solutions are used by organisations such as Rentokil Initial, Cambridge Assessment, Millennium and Copthorne Hotels Plc, and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

ePC helps these and many other organisations replace manual and repetitive tasks with solutions that deliver bottom line improvement within processes such as capital expenditure (CapEx) request approval and exam paper capture and processing.

ePC holds ISO 9001: 2015 accreditation, Cyber Essentials certification and is on the UK government’s G-Cloud 10 framework.

A healthy and on-going partnership

Building long-term partnerships with both software providers and clients is key to ePC’s success, allowing them to build extensive knowledge of specific technologies and quickly design, develop, deploy and support solutions to meet the demanding needs of its customers.

One of the key partnerships that ePC has nurtured over many years is with OpenText, providers of OpenText™ TeleForm™ and OpenText™ LiquidOffice™, part of the Intelligent Forms Automation Suite. ePC has been a TeleForm and LiquidOffice partner for many years and has extensive experience in the automation of forms capture, including the recognition of handwriting.

Alan Ingram, Technical Director at ePC, explained the importance of its partnership with OpenText:

Working with TeleForm and LiquidOffice over many years, deploying solutions such as examination capture and marking and clinical trials means that our customers can achieve their goals, with some making annual savings in excess of £1 million.

OpenText technology supporting the leader in language assessment

Customers such as Cambridge Assessment, part of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, process more than five and a half million examinations every year. ePC was engaged to create a web portal to distribute personalised exam papers as downloadable PDFs to centers around the globe. At the end of each exam, completed papers are scanned and uploaded using ePC's eScan web scanning solution, negating the need to handle large amounts of paper and ship it around the world.

Ingram explained in more detail:

To extract and verify the data, Cambridge Assessment use the OpenText TeleForm product to confirm that each paper is accurate. Only unrecognised characters are shown to the operator, with the majority of papers requiring zero human interaction. OpenText TeleForm is the ideal solution for this type of application, as it is capable of handling the high volume of data exchange that Cambridge Assessment has. We used the TeleForm Designer module to redesign exam papers to improve the processing of scanned images. The TeleForm Reader module is used for image processing and TeleForm Verifier is utilised where the Reader cannot automatically recognize what is written on the exam paper.

Each paper is identifiable by a candidate number and the session the candidate attended, encoded into two-dimensional barcodes. Once candidates have completed the examination, papers are scanned immediately at the center with no physical paper sent to examiners. TeleForm is used to check the images for quality and extract the raw data for marking. Scanned paper uploads run synchronously with scanning to minimise the time taken to return exam papers, contributing to the goals of the solution to drive efficiencies, lower costs and reduce risk.

We have looked at other options to TeleForm, but it remains our preferred product for such applications, contributing to the outcomes our customers seek and also to our revenues. The relationship with OpenText has gone from strength to strength, and we are now OEM partners for both TeleForm and LiquidOffice

Alan Ingram, Technical Director, ePartner Consulting Ltd

The following results have been realised:

• Increased solution value for customers with lower operating costs and greater efficiency
• Improved outcomes of packaged solutions, e.g., examination paper distribution and marking, clinical trials and training evaluation
• Developed strong partnership with OpenText delivering mutual benefits

To learn more about our OpenText solutions, please contact us.