The Great Harwood based scanning company, Scancapture has won a contract to manage the processing and reporting of John Lewis’ 2010 Partner Survey. This is the 7th year in a row that Scancapture have been chosen to handle this work for John Lewis and its’ sister company Waitrose and will involve capturing data from over 70,000 members of staff in just 4 weeks.
The recent 2009 Partner Survey saw Scancapture process data from 69,000 staff from over 240 branches and type up 1.5 million words, all of which helped to paint a vivid picture of both where John Lewis are succeeding and where they need to focus in the future to continue to make the Partnership an enjoyable place to work and a business to be proud of.
The paper based survey is made up of 33 questions and gives the option to add hand written comments. Forms are either posted in sealed ballot boxes in each branch or posted direct to Scancapture, where the comments are typed up and the forms scanned. At no point does anyone from John Lewis see individual forms, ensuring that Partners have the confidence to be completely honest.
Scancapture produced more than 1200 reports, returning the information just 5 days after receiving the completed forms. These reports compare the latest results to historical data dating back to 2003.
Scancapture use a combination of high speed document scanners with optical doubles detection to prevent any double feeds and sophisticated intelligent character recognition (ICR) software to automatically “read” the tick boxes, numbers and letters written on the questionnaire. Any questionable or incorrectly completed papers are manually checked on screen by an operator and the open ended comments are keyed from the papers. As a large part of this project is automated by using technology, the whole process takes around one tenth of the time it would take for a manual operator to key the data into a computer database.
Managing Director of John Lewis, Andy Street says “Scancapture have been involved in our paper based Partner Survey since it’s inception in 2003 and the service we’ve received over the last six years has been outstanding. The survey process has been constantly refined – while we surveyed 20 branches a month for 10 months of the year when we began, in 2009 over 240 branches (and 69000 Partners) were surveyed in just 8 weeks. The complexity of this task requires attention to detail, reliability, flexibility and a ‘can do’ attitude – all of which Scancapture delivers at a fair price.”
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