Background
This IT company is a trusted contractor for various government departments as well as many commercial companies, offering IT and training services in several specialized fields. Among their services, this company manages critical personnel data of government employees and processes it for reporting and analysis. The company must extract and feed data into the personnel CRM system, while ensuring data accuracy and integrity.
Use Case
The government hires hundreds of employees every month. Their contractor, the IT company, manages all of the personnel data, which is stored on the government’s main database system in the form of PDFs. These documents include work history, skills, education, personal information, and current assignments.
The IT company, as a contractor, did not have access to the main government system, and was forced to download read-only PDFs and manually extract key data fields. These PDFs often had varying layouts, forcing employees to spend hours searching for information. Often the PDFs had unidentified fields and sections, which led to incorrect information being uploaded into the CRM, impacting the overall quality of data.
With so much manual effort required, the IT company often faced delays and mistakes that impacted data accuracy and integrity. The IT company came to Astera searching for a smarter and faster solution that could handle their critical personnel data.
“We are getting rid of the manual data entry so that we can make the process more efficient and save time. We also have seen a stark reduction in manual data entry errors, allowing us to work with quality data.”
– Data Architect, IT Company
Enter Astera ReportMiner
The IT Contractor found Astera ReportMiner to be the best solution to handle its automated data extraction needs. Astera ReportMiner is a complete data extraction solution that is purpose-built to handle a range of unstructured data formats. It combines rule-based data extraction with an enterprise-grade ETL engine to help businesses streamline the ETL process to liberate data trapped in unstructured files.
Astera’s ReportMiner solution helped reduce the time IT employees were spending on extracting data manually from hours to minutes. Previously, a PDF personnel file could take up to three hours to extract data from; now it takes only ten minutes.
“I can easily say that we are saving 1000 hours of manual data entry work a year with ReportMiner. That’s just for the personnel data system. In other words, it takes just 10 minutes to process a file instead of three hours.”
– Data Architect, IT Company
When a PDF file arrives in the government’s main database system, all an employee has to do is download it and put it into a folder connected to ReportMiner. ReportMiner will automatically read any file dropped into the folder and extract the data.
The solution has prebuilt report models in place, allowing it to quickly read PDFs, map fields, and extract the required data from key sections. After the extraction process is complete, the solution moves the data to a staging SQL table to create a series of SQL views through queries. The data architects then enhance the quality of data further, integrate it using web services, and finally populate the personnel CRM system.
Profile
This IT company is a trusted contractor for various government departments. It processes critical personnel data and curates said data for reporting and analysis.
Industry
Government
Use Case
The IT company struggled to extract data from read-only PDFs. To manually extract the data took up to three hours per PDF and led to data quality issues from errors during data entry.
Product
Astera ReportMiner
Result
Now, it takes the IT company less than ten minutes to process each PDF and without manual data entry, there is a stark reduction in data quality issues.
The Future
As the IT company deals with many other similar data extraction projects, it is looking at Astera ReportMiner to fulfill those needs as well. For example, in addition to maintaining personnel work history, the IT company also manages personnel medical data, including immunization records. As the download and extraction process is the same, the IT company is planning to use ReportMiner for that project as well.
Additionally, the IT company has many untouched historical documents, which up to this point have been in an unusable format. With ReportMiner, the company plans to finally unlock the hidden insights in these documents and use them to make future business decisions.
Overall, Astera ReportMiner helped the IT company reduce the time and mistakes that come with manual PDF data extraction. The company was particularly impressed by the excellent support Astera provided for developing a deeper understanding of ReportMiner’s functionality and implementing the solution within their existing process. ReportMiner is easy to learn, use, and adapt to many different areas of use. Astera’s products have rapid ROI and lead to actionable insights, allowing companies to make data driven decisions.
“I just like that the tool lets me solve a business problem that cannot be solved without the tool.”
– Data Architect, IT Company