Stimulation Initiative for European Neural Applications
Esprit Project 9811
Neural OCR Processing of Employment Demands
Company Background
El Corte Ingles is the major department store in Spain, with an
annual income of more than one trillion pesetas and more than 50.000
employees.
Description of the problem
As one of the largest companies in Spain, El Corte Ingles receives a
large amount of job demands in its central personnel offices. Its
large volume makes necessary an agile processing of the information of
any prospective employee. To do so, El Corte Ingles has designed an
abbreviate form in which the most relevant information about the
qualifications of a person demanding a job can be entered. Once that
information has been incorporated to its databases, the recruiting
personnel at El Corte Ingles can easily analyse it to demand more
detailed information to the smaller number of persons that may fit
best the company's need at a given moment. In any case, the initial
basic personnel information processing remains the major bottleneck in
the whole process.
Neural Network Techniques application
Neural OCR is becoming the mainstream way of optically recognising
printed material. In the case of El Corte Ingles, the own company has
designed an abbreviate form with the basic information they need to
start the evaluation of a prospective employee. Moreover, when a more
specific centre demands have to be met, that basic form has to be
modified so that it incorporates the new relevant information. The
PC-based, off-the-shelf system RAMA (developed by the Instituto de
Ingenier=EDa del Conocimiento-IIC) is particularly well suited to El
Corte Ingles' demands. Besides its excellent OCR capabilities, RAMA
makes possible the definition and redesign of recognition masks
especially tailored for specific forms. This, together with the name
and surname dictionaries, its capacities to incorporate validation
checks and the possibility of incorporating user defined dictionaries,
gives to RAMA a very high versatility for a company that has to deal
with different forms for different tasks.
Benefits
RAMA ensures a prompt and precise processing of the basic information
that El Corte Ingles has deemed interesting for its personnel
selection. Besides the modest hardware requirements, RAMA's ability to
the design and editing of recognition masks associated to different
forms allows El Corte Ingles to target best its employment
information.
Generalisation
The OCR application described here is typical of the OCR requirements
of personnel selection processing in large companies. They need a
moderate cost system with modest hardware requirements (a PC and a
lower segment scanner), and the ability to use it for different forms.
As El Corte Ingles' case shows, RAMA is an ideal choice for these
companies.
Contact person
Jose Luis Piqueras - R+D Projects Chief - Informatica El Corte Engles,=
c/ Doctor Zamenhof, 22 - 28027 Madrid Spain.
![[ ]](../logo_small.gif){kind=logo}
SIENA