Amway in Russia automated processing of client agreements using ABBYY FormReader

The ABBYY company, software developer and service provider in the field of linguistics, recognitions of documents and data entry, announced end of the first stage of the project on system implementation of input of the hand-written ABBYY FormReader forms in the Russian division of Amway – the international company of direct sales. All agreements with distributors of Amway LLC, forms of orders of products and also finance documents are processed by means of the solution of ABBYY now. The created system is capable to process to 350 thousand pages of documents a month, says ABBYY.

The business model of Amway is based on the principles of direct sales when goods and services of the producer are implemented by network of independent distributors who, in turn, can involve new sales agents. Scales of business of Amway in Russia are like that that the company needs to process tens of thousands of incoming documents a month: forms of orders of products from the NPA, agreements with new sales representatives, bonus acts and other documents. Due to the rapid growth of number of distributors (about 45 thousand new agreements a month at the time of the beginning of implementation) the management of the Russian representative office of Amway made the decision to optimize important business processes and involved technologies of ABBYY in processing of documentation.

The solution ABBYY FormReader was selected as optimal for implementation of effective objectives, noted in ABBYY. In the course of implementation its functionality was finished taking into account specifics of the project, the modified version of the solution received the name Amway Edition. Now document handling happens as in head office Amway in Russia, and directly in 13 shopping centers through the whole country. The document handling complex based on ABBYY FormReader represents network of the local systems which are capable to work independently of each other. Each of 14 stations is capable to process to 25 thousand pages a month. Thus, sales agents of the company fill out agreements or forms of the order of products, and then by means of the solution of ABBYY documents are scanned, recognized and exported to an information system of Amway.

For simplification of work of operators a system included a number of opportunities: functions of a preview and printing of the scanned documents with different working marks which are done by users of a system are added. Besides, integration into the address qualifier of KLADR – the official qualifier of the Federal Tax Service representing the complete list of the postal addresses of Russia is implemented. When processing the Address field of ABBYY FormReader it is automatically verified with KLADR and if the specified address exists, a system brings it in base. It will allow Amway to avoid expenses on sending goods to obviously wrong addresses, consider in ABBYY.

At the second stage of the project it is going to create the system of web scanning of agreements and orders using which it will be possible to send the filled forms to the center of document handling Amway from any computer without binding to shopping center of the company. It will be for this purpose necessary to use the web interface of the ABBYY FormReader scanning station.

"We expect that ABBYY FormReader will allow us to reduce costs of the company considerably. Already now we could transfer 60% of work of the central office to regional representative offices – document handling happens directly on places now. It is possible to speak also about increase in the service level of our agents and also about reduction of malformed data in a corporate information system, – Burmistrov Vsevolod, the head of IT projects of the Russian representative office of Amway told. – The ABBYY company proved as the reliable and responsible partner. We are going to transfer successful experience of implementation in the Russian representative office of Amway to other regional offices of the company".