Lancaster University – HR Scanning

Project Background Employee Records Document Scanning Case Study

Lancaster University is a globally ranked University providing inspiring teaching and research.  It is Top 10 in all three major national league tables. The University has around 12,000 full-time students and over 3,000 employees.

The University wanted to digitise their confidential Employee Records as part of their Paper Lite Project. They had 4500 HR files for scanning with over 360,000 images.   The paper files were accommodated in 8 metres of racking which took up a significant amount of office space.  A fast turnaround was required due to the nature of the data.

Key Drivers

  • To improve business processes that are highly dependent on paper.
  • To ensure GDPR Compliance for personal data.
  • Free up valuable office space to make room for additional staff.
  • Enable authorised staff throughout the campus to be able to find information quickly, using digital search.

The Solution 

  • Cleardata collected the Records from Lancaster University’s Campus using their fleet of tracked vehicles.
  • Boxes were checked in using barcode labelling and technology to enable information to be found quickly for any file retrieval requests. Scan on demand file retrieval was available throughout the project to enable the University to access any live HR Files.
  • Records were indexed by Employee Number.
  • As part of the preparation process curled edges were smoothed, staples, paperclips and treasury tags removed, poor quality originals identified and Post it notes moved to areas to avoid any data restriction.
  • The majority of the Employee Records were A4, with some A3 and A5 documents. These were scanned using Cleardata’s fleet of high production Kodak Scanners which provide a high quality digital image to 300dpi.
  • Images were OCR’d as part of the scanning process to produce a searchable digital image.
  • All images were quality checked twice, at the point of scanning and again by our QC team.
  • Digital images were output to PDF/A on Hard Drives.
  • Originals are being securely stored for a 12 month period in our secure archiving facility.
  • Records were scanned within 3 weeks to meet the University’s deadline.

Client Feedback

“Cleardata has enabled us to move towards our milestone of paperless working. They really understood our business requirements and delivered on time, digitising over 173 boxes of employee records to searchable PDF/A format. The quality of the images was very high in comparison to our previous provider and the OCR search function was much better as well.   It’s been a really smooth process, thanks to all the team for their efforts ”.

HR Team, Lancaster University