QUALITY CONTROL

ICC Services only hires experienced operators and they are rigorously screened for both speed and accuracy. Initial assignments are on work that is subject to full verification until we are assured of an acceptable level of keyboarding accuracy. New jobs are analyzed to determine which operators are best suited to those types of documents and the first records keyed are reviewed 100% by the supervisor to assure that the correct procedures are being used. This process also applies whenever an operator is assigned to a job for the first time. All operators have regular quality reviews where their work is sampled by their supervisor (100% verification of randomly selected records/batches). The maximum time between quality reviews for each operator is two days. An optional QA program can be tailored to your specifications for your job in addition to the programs described below.

KEY VERIFICATION

The oldest tradition in this industry has been 100% key verification; two operators key the same data in two separate passes. The first operator is recording the characters onto a server based hard drive. When the second operator opens that batch, the characters are loaded into memory. The second operator's keystrokes are compared with the data as it was entered and miss-compares are resolved. The result is an overall accuracy level of 99.95%. Where the accuracy of each character is critical, this remains the best methodology. The decision to key verify can be made on a field-by-field basis.

COMPUTER EDITING

The next level of quality assurance is the use of computer editing. A common example of this would be the use of check digits as are frequently found in certain types of account numbers. The use of table look-ups is another routine used to reduce the need for key verification while assuring a high level of quality. For example, ICC uses a combination of the first three characters of the city name along with the zip code to extract the complete city name and state codes with 100% reliability. Other types of table look-ups can yield similar results. Other possible editing opportunities would include: fields where the data are limited to a few possibilities (such as the numbers 1-5) and/or can be logically linked to the data in another field. (If 'x' is '1' than 'y' can only be '2'.) While this will result in a high level of accuracy, the range of possible applications makes it more difficult to generalize about the overall level of the results. That being said, our experience would indicate a probability of about 98% accuracy.

SINGLE PASS DATA ENTRY

Depending upon how the data will be used once it has been converted for the computer, it is possible to only rely upon a single keyboarding by one operator. Where the data is reasonably legible and uncomplicated, this will result in an overall accuracy of about 95%. This assurance is based on our experience from the results of key verification and from our use of quality control procedures that are considered a part of our regular overhead, independent of the level of verification requested by the customer.