E EAS
DL
Leading bank in Kuwait digitises
50 million documents using
scanners from Alaris and expertise
of Alaris’ partner Ashraf & Co Ltd.
ID
AL
I O N E L S
G
E
R ANN
CH
DLE E
GULF BANK
MOVES FROM PAPER TO
DIGITAL RECORDS WITH HELP OF
ALARIS AND PARTNER
A
laris, a Kodak Alaris business,
has announced that it has played
a key role in Gulf Bank’s Digital
Transformation. The bank has digitised 50
million documents using scanners from
Alaris which has dramatically reduced
physical storage space and resulted in huge
cost savings.
Document retrieval now takes just a few
clicks. Processes that once took weeks are
now completed in a few minutes.
Gulf Bank is one of the leading banks in
Kuwait with a broad offering of consumer
banking, wholesale banking, treasury and
financial services.
The bank decided a few years ago that in
this digital age, to maintain its position as the
leading financial institution in the country, it
needed to embrace Digital Transformation.
The perfect starting point would be the
digitisation of documents and establishment
of an enterprise document management
system in order to manage information with
greater efficiency, facilitate better sharing
and collaboration, reduce costs, enhance
security and compliance, boost productivity
and improve the bottom line.
A spokesperson from Gulf Bank’s IT
department said: “We had millions of
documents that were stored across various
branches and had to be retained as per
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regulatory requirements. Besides the huge
costs involved in storing the mountains
of documents, there was also the risk of
damage and loss due to fire, theft etc.
“We also believed that our staff used to
spend a major part of their working hours
filing, organising, storing and retrieving
documents relating to various processes.
And when a document was misplaced, the
amount of time spent on retrieval increased
exponentially. Digitising these documents
and implementing a DocSearch Retrieval tool
was imperative.”
Gulf Bank had a large number of old
documents available in paper format
and microfilm, and the bank was using
various disparate solutions for document
management, including scanning and storage.
Storing these documents in paper format
was very expensive and there was risk of
damage and loss, as well as unsecured paper
handling. Retrieving documents was difficult
and time consuming. Microfilm made retrieval
of documents tedious and time consuming,
requiring manual effort to go through the
complete film roll to locate a particular
document since there was no indexing.
Gulf Bank contracted Ashraf & Co Ltd
Kuwait, an Alaris partner and a leading IT
solutions company specialising in document
management, archival, business process
management, and the outsourcing of end-to-
end digitisation projects.
A total of 50 million documents have
been scanned so far using production,
departmental and desktop scanners from
Alaris (i1420/ i3500/ i4200/i5250). Ashraf
& Co has developed and implemented the
DocSearch tool in-house for the bank with a
‘self-service’ capability, which helps users to
retrieve any document type in minutes.
Mohammad Rashed, at Ashraf & Co
Ltd, said: “We are an Alaris Elite partner
and are committed to promoting the
company’s solutions in Kuwait because the
company’s solutions consistently exceed
our expectations and the requirements of
our customers. High volume scanners from
Alaris provide faster scanning, reliable
performance with accurate output and our
service team is well trained on operating and
maintaining these machines. With regards
to the Gulf Bank project, the Alaris scanners
operated around the clock, scanning millions
of documents without a single breakdown.
This is a testament to the world class quality
and durability of Alaris products.”
Ashraf & Co has completed the backlog
scanning project and now is handling daily
document scanning for which the company
has been contracted by the bank for the next
three years.
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