User Guide

Form Types
The cost of manual processing
In the previous section you saw that the lumpsum and running
costs of manual forms processing add up to a pretty sum. And we
have the first conclusion.
But money is not the only problem associated with manual
forms processing. You will need additional staff and another tier of
management. Obviously it takes some time to set up a team of 8
10 employees and buy the necessary equipment. And some of the
new staff may not like this tiresome job and leave.
Now suppose your client needs his forms processed by tomor
row or by the day after tomorrow. Obviously, high costs is not the
only problem  you simply won't be able to kickstart the whole
process within these two days. The second conclusion suggests
itself.
Another important point is that whatever the size of your pro
cessing team, you won't be able to increase their productivity
quickly  hiring additional operators is useless unless you provide
them with the right equipment. This equipment will require addi
tional office space. Hiring additional staff entails costs which are
comparable to the lumpsum costs of setting up the entire team.
The third conclusion is:
There is a host of other problems. The most critical of them
have to do with the human factor, and this is practically unsolv
able. Manual data entry is a tedious job  try typing, for example, a
newspaper article in your word processor. This means that even
experienced keyers will make mistakes, and their number tends to
increase towards the end of the working day. Some of these mis
takes will be corrected by the output controller, but controllers are
also human, and the quality of the output data tends to deterio
rate. And typing is a great strain for the eyes, so you are likely to get
complaints from your staff as early as within the first two months.
The quality of the output data is likely to be unacceptably low
because a human operator cannot verify data character by charac
ter for hours. Your customer will never be happy with an errorrid
den database which your team of operators took so long to create.
Two other conclusions arise:
It follows, then, that manual forms processing is not the best
solution, particularly for companies which need to process large
number of forms regularly.
Manual processing is expensive.
Manual processing takes time to set up.
Manual processing is not easily scalable.
Your staff won't like the job. And you won't like the
results of the their work.
Scheme of manual forms processing.
Input
Manager
Database
keyers