American Airlines  
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Over ten years ago, American Airlines created a department known as IdeAAs In Action to receive suggestions from its employees as well as subsidiaries. Employing fifty analysts and support personnel, this department has saved the company more than $300 million since its inception in 1987. This department is located in three separate locations, Fort Worth-Headquarters, Fort Worth-Alliance Airport and Tulsa-Maintenance Base.

THE PROBLEM

IdeAAs In Action was trying to respond to over 30,000 handwritten suggestions each year. These were sent through the mail to any one of the three locations. After data entry, the forms were sorted and manually routed to the appropriate analyst. When the analyst determined the suggestion was feasible, the tracking application generated an IdeAA number. The ideas were sent to the responsible department for review. Files were distributed locally and to facilities hundreds of miles away. Copies were maintained in a file room. When the analysts needed to refer to them, many times the contents of the file or the entire file itself was missing.

THE SOLUTION

After evaluating several competitive proposals, Image-X was selected as the best system to meet their requirements: quick file retrieval, ease of use, integration with their mainframe database application, support for optical storage distributed over a wide area network and ability to use existing workstations.

Working closely with American Airlines, Image-X provided a customized imaging/workflow application that includes scanning, indexing and faxing of images. Suggestion forms are now pre-printed with bar codes to reduce the cost of data entry and improve accuracy. The forms are batch scanned into the Image-X workflow system using Fujitsu scanners with automatic document feeders. Next, the bar-code recognition software reads each form and automatically indexes it into the imaging system. After indexing the workflow software reads the assigned analyst from the mainframe and routes the document images via the department’s Novell Groupwise e-mail system. Because an analyst may be handling more than 100 ideas at a time, document images are temporarily stored on the network hard drive while in the workflow state. This provides the fastest response time for retrieving images.

Image-X provided a customized workflow interfaced with the mainframe database (DB2) and electronic mail applications (Groupwise and HP Desk) for scanning, indexing, routing and retrieval of documents. The components at both Fort- Worth Headquarters and Tulsa-Maintenance Base include a Hewlett-Packard Optical Jukebox with a capacity of 40GB connected to a SunSparc29 IMAGEserver. This provides the three years of an on-line storage they required. Each location has a scanning station, an image server, a fax server, and the following software: IMAGEmate for scanning and indexing, MINDS for archival file management, IDS for viewing multiple data types, IMAGEflow for rules based and ad hoc routing of documents, IMAGEfax for fax management and bar-code recognition software for automatic indexing of documents. Fort Worth-Alliance Airport has a scan station that gives this location the ability to scan, index and view documents. All three locations are connected over existing T-1 lines.