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Industry:Education

ABBYY Enables India's Top IT Training Institute, NIIT, to Reach Scholarship Award Decisions in a Matter of Days

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Success Made Possible With ABBYY FormReader™ Technology and Superior Customization by NETSPIDER INDIA

“Bhavishya Jyoti Scholarships is NIIT’s effort to recognise and foster meritorious students and help meet the industry demands for trained IT manpower. NETSPIDER INDIA and ABBYY solutions showed us the way to expedite the process of our Entrance Test through its OCR technology”, Mr. Dixit, Project Coordinator, NIIT.

Background

NIIT is one of the pioneers in the field of IT education and training in India with its branches in over 30 countries around the world. The Institute provides comprehensive education to individuals and enterprises.

NIIT's Bhavishya Jyoti Scholarships (BJS), for IT education is one of the most prestigious offerings for the Indian student community. The scholarship aims to reward excellence and bring IT learning at affordable price to meritorious and economically challenged students in India. It has become a symbol of hope for India’s youth.

Bhavishya Jyoti Scholarships have transformed the lives of over 225,000 Indian students since its introduction in the year 1991. The scholarships entitle deserving students for fee waivers ranging from 15 to 100% on any of NIITs programs - Futurz, CATS or SWIFT - series.

Challenge
In the year 2005 the number of scholarships to be given out countrywide was 30,000 out of 150,000 applications. Manual processing of 150,000 forms would have taken at least two months involving 30 data entry operators: equivalent to 29,160 man-hours. Aside from thousands of man-hours, accuracy level of such method of data entry was uncertain. Nevertheless, the institute had a strict deadline: the results had to be declared in a weeks’ time, as admission for the courses were just around the corner. Strict timeframes, thousands of hand-filled forms, confidentiality and accuracy: these were the circumstances NIIT was facing.

Solution
As the challenge was serious and scale massive, a powerful and highly-dependable form processing solution was to be found. ABBYY Software House, a world leader in data capture technologies with a vast distributor network worldwide, got involved in this case through its partner in India, NETSPIDER INDIA (NIIL). NIIL had considered complexity and specifications of the project and rose to the challenge of processing 150,000 scholarship forms in 5 days. The proposed solution was ABBYY FormReader, an award-winning form processing technology which features intelligent analysis, classification, extraction and export of data from forms. CANON (9080) high speed capacity scanners at 120 pages per minute were the hardware.

NIIT-Scheme

NETSPIDER INDIA had managed the project through all the stages, including pre- and post- processing:
1) Template design: defining settings, creating rules, fine-tuning verification process.
2) Form design and form printing.
3) Coordinating with the customer’s logistics company to pick up the forms and dispatch all over India.
5) Collecting batches of forms from various regions upon completion and scanning them.
6) Data export as per the customer’s specifications.

Processing accuracy was impeccable, for there is a verification stage in ABBYY FormReader where any incorrectly- and uncertainly- recognized characters are manually checked by a verifier. It is done in ABBYY FormReader’s advanced, yet easy to use verification interface which ensures complete, 100% accuracy of the end result. Thanks to the template created by NETSPIDER INDIA, verification became a dream walk.

Accurately capturing handwritten data from 150,000 forms in 5 days is a testimony to powerful functionality of ABBYY FormReader and expert customizations by NIIL’s engineers. ABBYY FormReader is ideally suitable for educational institutions: with minimum pre-processing and tuning, the solution is ready to be used.

The future of many aspiring candidates was successfully managed by NIIT with NETSPIDER INDIA’s superior end-to-end solutions backed by CANON high capacity scanners and ABBYY’s state-of-the-art form processing technology.

About NIIT
NIIT, an acknowledged leader in the IT and IT-assisted training space, offers learning and knowledge solutions in 32 countries. Headquartered in New Delhi since 1981, NIIT operates through 100% subsidiaries in Europe, USA, Asia Pacific and Japan. NIIT's value proposition includes a distinct quality advantage, availability of leading-edge IT skills and a flexible delivery model. More details are available at www.niit.com

About NetSpider India (NIIL)
NETSPIDER INDIA specializes in ABBYY channel distribution and giving end-to-end solutions in various fields like imaging, networking, scanning, connectivity, Project consultancy, and doing developments around ABBYY technology. NETSPIDER INDIA has experienced technical skills in implementing ABBYY FineReader OCR, FormReader Enterprise, Desktop, FlexiCapture Studio and other ABBYY products. More details are available at www.niil.in