Itella Information creates one international document scanning environment standardising on Kodak’s production scanners

Eastman Kodak Company today announced that Itella Information, the service bureau division of Itella Group, has harmonized its production scanner infrastructure selecting Kodak as its main partner. To support ongoing growth of the business and add future capacity for growth, four i1860 scanners, the fastest ever high volume systems from Kodak, have been purchased for use at its production centers in Finland and Sweden.

This is a significant deal as Itella Information’s extensive scanner fleet will be now be predominately Kodak based thereby simplifying hardware management, improving efficiency and flexibility in a hugely price sensitive and competitive business.

Formerly known as Finland Post Group, the company was renamed Itella Group in June 2007 and provides traditional consumer focused postal services in Finland under the Posti brand, along with services to businesses in Finland and eight other northern European countries as Itella (1). Operating in three business areas –Itella Logistics (freight services), Itella Mail Communication (letter and direct mail delivery) and Itella Information (outsourced document management services, invoicing and business communication), the Group employs over 24k staff with net sales in 2006 totaling EUR 1,550.6 million.

Itella Information provides a range of standardized and bespoke services for customers with particular focus on digitizing solutions which covers invoice processing and document process outsourcing. Itella manages the whole lifecycle of documents from initial scanning, workflow, document management, electronic archiving and subsequent access.

Working with companies of all sizes, but specializing in supporting those with heavy document processing needs, key digitizing customers operate mainly in the banking, insurance and government sectors and include the Scandinavian banks, Sampo and Nordea, Pohjola, a non-life insurance company, and the Finnish vehicle registration and tax authorities.

The volume of documents and invoices handled by Itella Information is substantial. In Finland, the company processes some 260,000 separate items daily which equates to approximate 70 million annually, with the total number of documents throughout all Itella regions now topping 100 million each year.

This makes the digitizing solution service area a fast growing part of Itella Information’s business with revenue tripling in 3 years and invoice scanning volumes in Sweden, for example, doubling in the first seven months of 2007.

To support this growth and add capacity for the future, Itella Information has installed two Kodak i1860 production scanners in Finland, purchased through Kibi, with two units being installed shortly in Sweden through ReadSoft. Processing 200 pages per minute, the i1860 is the fastest ever scanner from Kodak and has been ergonomically designed to improve operator productivity. At a touch of a button, the height of the unit can be changed, with a LCD touch screen control unit making it easy to operate.
Creating an unified international scanning production environment – based on Kodak – we will improve efficiency and simplify management, training and support. The company already has a range of i600 and i800 series scanners at six production centers. Kariniemi explains, “We can handle the Kodak scanner fleet without restriction and rotate equipment as we need. For example, when a i1860 was first installed in Finland one i660 scanner was moved to Latvia where the document volumes are smaller. After the transfer, the service was up and running in just a few hours.

Itella Information is also using Kodak’s Capture Software which enables it to take full advantage of all features in the hardware such as Kodak’s Perfect Page technology with iThresholding which produces extremely high quality scanned images without any need for settings to be adjusted. This is very important in a service bureau environment where the range of paper types processed is wide and continuous manual intervention to adjust settings would slow down operations considerably.

(1) Itella operates in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Lativa, Lithuania and Russia