Australia's leading and longest running residential smoke alarm specialist, Smoke Alarms Australia, has undertaken a major project to implement automated data capture and workflow.

The Australian owned and operated company was formed in 2005, as a specialist in fire protection for residential properties. It is affiliated with more than 2,000 real estate agents across the country, inspecting, installing and maintaining smoke alarms for properties under management.

Smoke Alarms Australia required a system to automate the data entry process with more efficiency and accuracy, as well as reduce human error and free up data entry staff to do other, more productive work.  Data Device was chosen as the specialist to provide two automated solutions, one for work order processing and the other for remittance advice processing.

ABBYY FlexiCapture technology now replaces manual data entry as it receives, analyses and captures information from documents and outputs the data direct into the firm's custom developed business system.

Smoke Alarms Australia’s CFO Namal Karunaratne says, “Prior to ABBYY, delays often occurred resulting in strained relations with our real estate agents.  Now work orders are received electronically and FlexiCapture automatically stores it in our system saving us time and cost without annoying our agents.”

In addition, Smoke Alarms Australia has been able to vastly speed up the experience private householders receive.  As a request gets raised through the website an email notification with a pdf work order is now automatically sent to a dedicated mailbox.   Every 20 seconds FlexiCapture scans the mailbox for new work orders and uploads the detail to the business system.

Namal commented that, “We now have only a small number of the work orders delivered by FlexiCapture’s verification station that require manual intervention.”

Dhruv Shah, business analyst at Data Device, said, “Smoke Alarms Australia has been able to reassign two team members from manual data entry to work on other more important business tasks.” 

Namal further said, “I would say that this technology has reduced the time to process volumes of 3,000 orders and 2,000 remittances a month by 70-80%, which is a very substantial productivity improvement.  

Data Device is now looking for new ways technology from ABBYY can support Smoke Alarms Australia in their desire to continue to improve their processes and deliver better service to all their customers.