Even the good works of charity need the firm rod of business systems to fulfill their missions of service. Samaritan's Purse is a nonprofit Christian mission organization that provides food, clothing, shelter, and medical care to victims of war and natural disaster - earthly needs that earn it a hearing for its spiritual message. Led by Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Rev. Billy Graham, Samaritan's Purse prides itself on its quick response to areas of need worldwide, such as aid to the victims of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras in late 1998 and a Worldwide Medical Mission connecting volunteer physicians with areas of need. However as its work flourished, Samaritan's Purse needed emergency aid on its own internal systems used to record, track and process donations - vital business systems that allowed donations to reach their target fast without the cost and time-delays of excessive bureaucracy. The organization turned to OCR for Forms, automated data entry software (should we say information capture instead?) from Microsystems Technology, Inc. (MTI) - and quickly doubled productivity, shortened processing lead times and found a new level of efficiency.

Based in Boone, NC, Samaritan's Purse is widely known for its Operation Christmas Child, whereby donors in the US, Canada and Australia fill a shoebox with Christmas toys to be distributed in third-world nations -- and often accompany it with a monetary donation. The program was a phenomenal success, growing from 110,000 donated shoeboxes in 1994 to 2.3 million in 1998 -- a rate of over 60 percent annually. A group of staffers were needed to manually rekey into a computer network the hand-printed names, addresses and other information that donors wrote on the form Samaritan's purse provided - as well as to record the donation amount. Labor was scarce in Boone, on the foothills of the Appalachian mountains near the Tennessee border, with a mainly student population from two nearby state universities. Getting local labor when it was needed was difficult.

As the program's success grew, lead times ballooned from receipt of the donations to entry into the computer system. It was one thing to process 3000 to 4000 shoeboxes each day when Operation Christmas Child began. But by late 1997, the popularity of the program meant arrivals of up to 30,000 shoeboxes on a single day during the holiday rush. Senior management wanted to close the fiscal books by January 21, 1998 -- three weeks after the calendar year's end. Samaritan's Purse leaders viewed prompt fiscal bookkeeping as not only essential as a fiduciary duty to benefactors, but critical to the rapid delivery of aid, since goods and funds couldn't be disseminated until they were recorded. Projections indicated that the fiscal books couldn't be closed that year until mid-February - and only if Samaritan's could hire double the staff to process donations. Such a delay was an unacceptable to management. "We realized that we could not do the work we were chartered to do by using our old methods," said Barry Hubert, director of information systems at Samaritan's Purse.

Hubert and his staff contacted RecTec Corporation, leading reseller of OCR for Forms based in Tampa, who recommended OCR for Forms along with scanners and customized interfaces. Samaritan's needs were complicated by its use of an older pre-printed donation form that featured solid lines underneath data, not "drop-out" forms that more readily support automated information capture. OCR for Forms automatically removes separates relevant characters from the preprinted form, a hard-to-find feature that appealed to Samaritan's Purse. RecTec organized a test scanning of Samaritan's Purse's existing forms on various scanners using OCR for Forms. OCR for Forms performed well, while other software systems under evaluation did not. Samaritan's Purse began its OCR for Forms installation in ___ 1997 (please confirm date) in time for the Christmas 1997 processing season.

Donation cards accompanying the shoeboxes are coded in Samaritan's mailroom, then sorted by code and prebatched into groups. Staffers make sure the cards attached to the donated shoeboxes are "scannable" and not torn or illegible. Once sorted, these #10 envelope size forms are run in batches through Samaritan's Fujitsu and Bell & Howell scanners. OCR for Forms software running on a Windows NT server automatically captures the important information, or, if information is missing or unclear, marks the file so that it will be reviewed later by an operator. Staffers work to review OCR for Forms records on their Windows 95 client workstations. They view an electronic image of the form on screen, checking fields the software has identified for verification and comparing the dollar amounts against an on-screen image of the hand-printed form that was scanned into the system. Once verified, batches of forms are "submitted" and stored as an ASCII file that is later uploaded to the corporate database (need name of this database).

Since the system now retained a scanned, electronic image of the paper forms, Samaritan's Purse was equipped to go the next step in streamlining its processing. It installed a T1 phone line, brought more scanners on line, and outsourced a portion of its processing to InService America in West Virginia, a professional Christian fundraising organization. InService American staff received scanned OCR for Forms data daily, reviewed and verified forms- then downloaded ASCII files back to Samaritan's computer network, where the core Samaritan's staff was at work on separate batches of forms.

"We knew we could improve our production rate with this setup. In fact, we nearly doubled the processing rate from what we expected - processing 625,000 contribution forms in a 7-week period," said Hubert. The software let individual operators who formerly could process 100 forms on hour, now process 150 to 200 forms per hour, he said. "Not only did we close the books on time -- we actually closed two business days early. It sure made for a lot of smiles around here."

"We also saw that OCR for Forms made a big contribution into the uniformity of the data being entered into our system, and to the cleanness of the data," Hubert said. "Before, everyone working in data entry had to know the rules and be good at keying. Now, verification is fairly straight-forward, and we can save any more complex post-processing decisions for a smaller, highly skilled core of staffers."

Hubert extolled the product's batch balancing support that served as a vital cross-check on daily totals of donations, before they were uploaded to the corporate database. He also appreciated the Accu-Zip feature in OCR for Forms that automatically corrected zip codes and town names.

"This is a highly flexible product for which people are constantly finding new applications," Hubert said. In mid-1998, Samaritan's Purse began using OCR for Forms with pre-printed monthly contributor donation forms and hand-printed volunteer registration forms. "We're continually amazed at how well it can convert fairly illegible handwriting into accurate and usable data. OCR for Forms is a cornerstone of a vital internal process for us as we grow and expand our ministry."