Public Sector Focus

The journey from paper to digital

Companies House is on a digitisation journey, aiming to replace paper-based processes with electronic ones. PSE spoke to its senior analyst programmer, Chris Morgan

Companies House, an executive agency of the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS), is responsible for registering and publishing company information, and incorporating and dissolving limited companies.

Tim Moss, its chief executive and registrar, said in the latest annual report that it aims to become “a fully digital organisation”, and it has recently completed a switch-over that sees all paper filings scanned on receipt.

There are 3.3 million registered companies, and 8.5 million documents get filed each year – about 1.9 million of which come in paper form. While incorporations and annual returns are overwhelmingly filed digitally, some types of form – a substantial proportion of ‘change of name’ forms and annual accounts, and all liquidations, for example – are still received by post.

Chris Morgan, senior analyst programmer, told PSE: “Even though we’ve been trying to push for people to file electronically, we still get a large volume of paper coming into Companies House every year.”

Paper-pushing

He said the traditional process was that those documents would come into the post room and be separated into the relevant workstream, with the paper then transported to the right department. The administration and problem-solving would be done by the examiner.

“If any documents were rejected,” he said, “they would have to physically process that rejection, sending the paper back to the person who sent the document in. It was a lot of work for the examiners, meaning they were not actually doing the examination, plus a lot of paper moving around the office unnecessarily.

“As normally happens with large volumes of paper, sometimes things went astray, and had to be found.”

From about mid-2013, Companies House began a search for digital solutions to all this paper, knowing that in the short to medium term, it would continue to receive many documents in the post.

It chose some “high-end” Kodak scanners – the i5800 model – but also needed sophisticated software for optical character recognition (OCR) to ensure precise and speedy digitisation of the scanned documents, and for document storage and workflow integration. It settled on Abbyy FlexiCapture Server.

Morgan said: “We investigated open source software, but in the end we looked at Abbyy’s solution. It came with lots of tools out of the box, could be easily configured, allowed zonal searching for information on the forms, so it basically did everything we needed it to do.”

The implementation in April 2014 involved “a big culture change”, Morgan said. “Now most of that work is done in the post room; not only are they opening the mail and sorting it, they are also doing the scanning and doing some checking for scanning errors upfront, because the sooner in the process we can identify problems, the better.

“The examiners are working differently too, from electronic images rather than physical paper. That was a big culture change for them, too, but in many ways it’s a lot more efficient for them now that they’re no longer dealing with the physical paper.”

The digitisation means the form type, company number and other key information is automatically read and processed, so the electronic image can be sent directly to the relevant department.

Morgan said: “Something we’d like to do at a future date, but we’re not there yet, is to peel off all the data from the form so that all the information is pre-populated for the examiner. For the moment, they are keying the rest of the data off the form.

“At the moment we are extracting key elements from the form – the form type, barcode information, company number, company name, for example – that’s enough information to allow us to allocate the work to the correct team.”

Not tied to a physical location

Carl Allen, enterprise architect at Companies House, said: “The prototype of using Abbyy FlexiCapture has been so successful, we plan to continue to use it and expand the number and type of forms that we process in this way.”

Morgan added: “The new system is reducing the workload on examiners: they can just focus on the examination of the data, rather than having to deal with the physical paper and dealing with the rejections. The examiners can work a lot faster now.

“Another benefit, although not quantifiable, is that because the paper isn’t tied to a physical location, an examiner can work at any desk. All their work items are electronically allocated to them. [They are] free to work anywhere in the building and potentially, at a later date, we could be introducing home-working.”

Companies House says the digitisation means customer information is now being retained more securely, too, alongside the benefits in terms of efficiency and flexibility.

Morgan added: “The ideal scenario would be not dealing with any paper, and everything coming through electronically, but that’s a long way away yet. But this is a big step in the right direction. I would say it’s been a great success for us.”

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