Imaging sinks paper blues during public floats

When the partial public offering of Telstra was made last year, the response was overwhelming. As the mums and dads of Australia scrambled to be a part of the telecommunications giant, they inadvertently created the single largest time-based imaging project ever seen in Australia.

Having been successfully completed, the parties responsible for managing the float have been able to confirm that there were some 5.5 million documents imaged. Without imaging technology, the likelihood of handling such enormous volumes of paper in the time frame would have been nigh impossible.

The Commercial Computer Centre (CCC), which handled the imaging and data entry for the float said that it processed as many as 200,000 applications in a single day.

Telstra's recent float saw 5.5 million documents processed.

Now that the Telstra float is over, there are plenty of more major Australian companies also looking to go public and which are equally reliant on imaging to deal with the volumes of work in the restricted times.

The CCC has already put in a bid for the AMP float, which is expected to be very large as well.

The use of imaging for such short-term large scale operations is creating a spate of alliances within the industry. The CCC has recently signed an agreement with two companies to handle an imaging project for the Lands Title Office in Canberra.

Insight Technology is the first Australian partner for UK-based Insight Technologies. The companies are two separate entities, despite the similar name.

It was through an article on Insight Technologies in the September/October 1997 issue of Image and Data Manager that the two companies made contact. Insight Technology, based in Canberra, was looking for a document management solution to market, interest was sparked by the article and discussions started.

Founded in 1995 by Paul Flaherty, Insight Technology's services include, office automation and messaging systems, imaging document management and workflow systems, document management need analysis consulting and government contract consulting.