The Bureau In Action

Video Transcript

Graham: Oh hello there Kev, Kev is our most senior bureau operative and you have been with us how long?

Kevin: 10 Years

Graham: and today I think you’re going to take us through some of the bureau processes we use for clients, yes?

Kevin: Yes, just to give you can idea of what we do with the paperwork and when it comes into our store room and stuff, so if we start with the store room?

Graham: Yeah that’s fine, I will follow you on through.

Kevin: This is one of our store rooms, we have another one upstairs and these are both kept locked at all times outside of work hours, inside of work hours the keys in there and we lock it when we go home.

The paperwork comes in through the big main roller door, usually with pre-arranged couriers that we have used in the past and have a good relationship with. As soon as we get the paperwork we sign for it and it will be checked, we always pre-arrange with the client what they are going to be sending us, so we can check it to make sure it’s exactly what they said they are sending, if not then we get in contact with them and check what’s happened along the route. Once we’ve checked it the paperwork is assigned to certain shelving, all these labelled up what it is. Depending on the client, we have some clients where the paperwork has to be done within the day and we have some where we have three or four weeks to have it turned around in. If it was a daily job then it would be checked straight in and a scanner operative would come out and get the paperwork and start on that straight away so we meet the SLA. SLA’s are all different for whichever the client needs, whichever we set with them.

Graham: Because we work from a specification form, don’t we?

Kevin: Yes we do yeah, whichever the client would need we can do and if they ever need any paperwork in the meanwhile, we can come out, find it for them and we have a secure emailing system that we can scan into and email it over to them, so if they needed to check over any of the documents we can do that for them.

Here we have some test paperwork that we can use to show you what we do after this. All jobs are slightly different but we generally have a prep process after we get the job and this demonstration is just simply taking the staples out, making sure all the paperwork is now non-stapled, the correct way round and ready to go on the scanner. I’ll just do a few of these just for the demonstration. Yeah that’ll be enough to show you how the scanner works.

Graham: And we have got a variety of scanners Kevin that we can use?

Kevin: Yes we do, we have scanners, this is one of our main scanners, very versatile machine with ADF for fast type output and it also has a flatbed on it that will do up to A3 and that’s for more delicate paperwork and stuff that won’t go through the ADF. But we also have scanners that will do purely high volume paperwork that will do over 2,000 documents an hour and we also have a machine that will do up to A0 scanning, for plans and things like that.

On this machine I’ll start the scan process, the ADF has taken the paperwork in and all we are looking for is image quality, making sure we have no lines and nothing disturbing the image and they’re all very nice and neat and clear. If we do have anything with poor quality we have ability to create and setting or change the setting, depending on the paperwork to get the best image out of the paperwork. If we don’t get the image we want and cannot improve the paperwork we always have a poor quality list with each job, depending on the client, sometimes we just provide the client with a list and we say this is the paperwork that we couldn’t get any better than it is, other clients to their specification we will pull the paperwork out, keep it until the end of the job and then we will go through it with them, show them the sort of paperwork and why we couldn’t improve it, but generally we can use the settings to get the best image we need.

Once we have scanned in, we then go to the indexing process and this can be as simple or as long as the client needs, depending on the information they need on the paperwork, for this demonstration we are just using a simple code up in the top corner and that will refer just to that one page and we can update and store that page. For other clients we will use a CSV file where we can put in a reference number they wanted, press return and it will bring up a list of whichever data they provide for that document.

Graham: That’s excellent, so we covered the poor quality and after scanning and indexing in then goes through to the QA procedures.

Kevin: It does yeah, which is all dealt with upstairs by a team of people and they will obviously check and re-check the paperwork before it gets processed on to disc or data transferred over to the client.

Graham: Which is fine, so that’s basically the scanning, indexing and paper prep stages and thank you very much indeed for taking us through that.

Kevin: That’s alright and we would welcome you at any time you wanted to come down here and see the process in person, if you wanted.

Graham: That’s excellent, thanks for your time Kevin.