Keeping passengers in check
Keeping passengers in check
Airline travellers are now less likely to slip through the security net of Australian immigration thanks to a new system in place that records passenger movements far more accurately than ever before. Rodney Appleyard reports.
Considering we live in insecure times, with the spectre of international terrorism casting a long shadow, a system that helps ensure all visitors to Australia can be kept firmly on the radar ought to prove invaluable.
In the past, all of the data from the passenger cards that require to be filled out and handed in on arrival in Australia used to be entered into Immigration's system manually, which had its shortfalls, not least the fact that it was very time consuming and was frequently prone to human error.
The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) was very concerned about how it was going to cope with the increasing volume of passengers it knew it would have to face in the future, especially since research had revealed that the number of visitors to Australia is expected to grow by five percent year on year. So it decided to seek a system which could handle this growing problem and provide more accurate analysis too.
Between 1999 and 2000, DIMIA started looking for this alternative system, eventually settling on Converga's Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) solution to upgrade the existing document processing system. Converga is owned by Outsource Australia.With 16 offices in Australia and 74 overseas, DIMIA typically has to accurately and speedily capture information on 18 million travellers a year spread across Australia.Claude Busse, the strategic development manager for Converga, explains why the new solution is light years ahead of the old system in terms of ensuring the integrity of information on each passenger.
"Passenger movements in and out of Australia are a critical source of information for the Commonwealth (for population estimate purposes), the police and tourism. DIMIA looked into getting a new system between 1999/2000 because the Olympics were coming up and the nation expected a sudden increase of new passengers to visit the country during the Games and afterwards.
"It intended to put in place an imaging system that would allow DIMIA to create a library that could store all of the information taken from the cards, so that investigations could be made on each person through a simple Intranet search.
"This has massively reduced the effort needed by DIMIA for finding information on passengers provided by the cards. About 70,000-100,000 cards are collected each day now and we process them through AU$1 million worth of equipment.
"Under the old system, each original passenger card used to be micro-filmed and the data on each card was entered in manually. Some of the information did not match the original card because it was typed in incorrectly. So staff would often have to go back to the original physical copy in order to find the most accurate data.
"But we have set up a number of automated quality processes into our new system that makes sure that the information on each card is recorded onto the database accurately every time. 99.5 percent of the information in the database now matches the physical card, whereas on the old system, 92 percent of information matched the on the system at the highest."
How does it work?
Converga chose FormWare as the tool to process the cards. FormWare is an automated forms processing platform that uses a combination of scanning and image enhancement modules and optical recognition technology to read, capture clean-up and extract mission-critical information from structured forms.
An image of each passenger card is captured by the system, which enables airport staff and other authorised personnel to have access to real-time traveller information, using direct links to Converga's secure document processing facility. This facility is certified by Australian Signals Directorate to handle classified information.
Optical character recognition (OCR) technology is applied to reduce the number of documents which have to be manually entered and a sophisticated set of processing techniques and algorithms have been developed to ensure that the processing of all document data is carried out accurately, timely and completed to the highest standard.
Busse adds: "A sophisticated validation process takes place to make sure the information is accurate. The data goes through a workflow, where it can pick up a mistake, or information that does not seem to match the set criteria created for categorisation. Once it identifies a problem, it then alerts an operator so that the information can be looked at by the right person, who would normally be somebody at DIMIA.
"Once this confusion has been cleared up, the card carries on down the pre-auditing process. It is programmed to understand mistakes, such as passengers not filling out the box properly, or filling out information outside of the box. It is intelligent enough to understand what the passenger meant to put down. If data is really unclear, then the system will use its intelligence to ask for human help again.
"These exceptions are placed into data quality queues for processing. So it acts like a big funnel, filtering out untidy cards for modification and processing clean cards quickly. Once the card has cleared all of the quality hurdles, only then will it be stored in the database. The solution can also read 12 different languages from over 100 countries."
The average number of cards processed now by each Converga staff has increased by 250 percent. Staff can perform look-ups via an Intranet and enjoy much improved auditing and tracking capabilities due to the centralised systems. The monthly distribution of data to other government agencies can now happen within three weeks after each month, whereas before, it would be a six to eight week delay. Busse believes that a key benefit of the solution is its ability to assist with the tracking down criminals or people who try to abuse the system. They can now be traced much more easily.
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