[ ] SIENA

Stimulation Initiative for European Neural Applications

Esprit Project 9811

Case Studies of Successful Applications

Neural OCR Processing of Sales Orders

Company Background

Reebok Espana is the Spanish subsidiary of the well known Reebok sport clothing company.

Description of the problem

Reebok Espana has two large sales campaigns, one in Autumn and another in Spring. They result in a large number of orders that Reebok salespersons report to Reebok headquarters for processing and the delivery of the associated goods. By obvious commercial reasons, these orders have to be processed in fast, accurate way. Seen from a yearly perspective, the total number of orders is certainly not extremely large. Its time concentration, however, results in a rather large peak load.

Neural Network Techniques application

Neural OCR is becoming the mainstream way of optically recognising printed material. In the case of Reebok, the own company has complete control on design aspects of the order form. This makes possible to use for its recognition an off-the-shelf system such as PC-based RAMA (developed by the Instituto de Ingenieria del Conocimiento-IIC). Besides its excellent OCR capabilities, RAMA makes possible the definition of recognition masks especially tailored for specific forms. This, together with its user defined dictionaries, gives to RAMA a very high versatility for a company that has to deal with different forms for different tasks. In Reebok's case, this capability allows the company to use RAMA for the recognition and processing of forms associated to different goods.

Benefits

As pointed before, RAMA ensures a prompt and precise processing of Reebok sales order, with a significant reduction of the resources Reebok employed before for these tasks.

Generalisation

The OCR application described here is typical of the OCR requirements of small 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 Reebok's case shows, RAMA is an ideal choice for these companies.

Contact person

Francisco Perez, REEBOK LEISURE, Antonio Machado 86 - 03201Elche -= Alicante - Spain.