Case Study: Greyhound Bus Lines

Greyhound Lines is the nations largest bus company. It’s also one of the largest volume users of document imaging technology in North America.

In April 97 they implemented WinOcular imaging solutions to process over 125,000 bus tickets per day. The Greyhound imaging department has 40 full-time workers, 4 high-speed Kodak scanners, and burns over 6 CDs per day.

Greyhound's first imaging application, Trip Processing, provides management accurate and timely information about revenue as related to each trip segment.

Because 80% of bus tickets are machine-created at the terminal with a barcode on the ticket, the recognition of segment revenue on these tickets is realized by entering the Bus Segment Routing information. The remaining 20% (24,000) bus tickets per day are processed through Forms Recognition and OCR to extract the required information from the scanned image of the ticket. Data Entry personnel look at all tickets that could be automatically processed and enter the required data.

Once the month is processed, this data is sent to the corporate revenue accounting system. Greyhound uses an Oracle Database running on a Windows NT server with their images being stored on a Novell file server.  Additionally, they store all images on several Kubik CD-ROM Jukeboxes. 

The installation of this application dramatically reduced Greyhounds ticket processing and operational expenses. This half-million dollar project was further justified by re-engineering the revenue accounting processes which resulted in tremendous and greater-than-expected labor savings. The improved revenue reporting was the major objective, with the resulting labor savings an additional and unplanned result.

The Greyhound Trip Processing software was later modified for installation at another bus company and allows these two carriers to electronically exchange data for inter-line settlement.

The Trip Processing application was such a success that in 1998 they installed a 2^nd application for the processing of Bus Bills which are created when people ship items via bus.

In all cases, high-speed Kodak scanners are used to scan the large volume of data. This optimized high-speed scanning software was also developed by Combined Computer Resources, Inc.

Now that the imaging department is established, Greyhound is expanding its imaging to other departments within their enterprise.

When your needs demand the very best in data management, innovative ideas, workflow and paperless office solutions, you can count on Combined Computer Resources, Inc.