Banishing the Paper Archive: Rhine-Ruhr Transport Association Moves to PDF/A

The Rhine-Ruhr Transport Association, a public transportation agency in Germany, has eliminated its legacy paper-based archive, moving more than 6 million documents to PDF/A format for long-term archiving. Now, the association can make these documents easily accessible to all employees in digital format with full-text search capabilities. And with state-of-the-art compression technology, even the largest color drawings require minimal storage space, making such a comprehensive collection easy to cost-effectively manage.

Over the years, the Rhine-Ruhr Transport Association (VRR) – a provider of public transportation based Gelsenkirchen, Germany – had amassed about 6 million documents, including folders full of invoices, rolled-up blueprints and construction drawings, building specifications and marketing materials, in file cabinets in the basement of the office. These paper archives took up a tremendous amount of storage space and created a challenge for those searching for the right files.  Tired of the inefficiency, VRR decided to move to an electronic archiving system.

Once the decision was made to digitize documents, VRR face the question: In what format should the documents be saved so they can be accessible in the future.  Some of the documents, such as brochures or marked-up plans, were in color, and it was important to retain the colored information. At the same time, the storage requirements for the files needed to low.

As they researched options, the PDF/A format came to the attention of the planners. It is based on the familiar, widespread portable document format (PDF) and supported color, full-text search capabilities and metadata. Moreover, as an ISO standard, PDF/A would provide them with maximum security for future use.  Compared to original formats produced by application software such as the Microsoft Office suite, PDF/A ensures that the documents remain readable for the long term; and a single viewer is all that is needed to display documents no matter what their origin.

“We finally decided on PDF/A because we wanted an innovative format that would secure our access to the information in the future,” said Katharina Massoth, an employee in the VRR’s IT group.

Now with a format selected, the association began to search for a scan service provider to do the work. VRR selected Wolfgang Orlowski GmbH, a data processing service provider in Essen, Germany, that specializes on document scanning and data capture. The company uses the PDF Compressor from LuraTech to convert scanned documents into highly compressed PDF/A files that are full-text searchable after integrated OCR steps are performed. The award-winning mixed raster content (MRC) layer compression technology from LuraTech reduces high-resolution black and white, grayscale and color scanned documents with compression rate of 1:100 or better.

“Luratech’s PDF Compressor enabled us to minimize VRR’s file size without loss of quality,” said Wolfgang Orlowski, CEO of the data processing company. The Orlowski team worked for a year to digitize all paper documents and made them available as PDF/A files on CD to the association.

Because the association uses the Microsoft SharePoint Server for document management, all scanned and compressed PDF/A documents were checked into SharePoint to provide employees with access to the entire document archive.

VRR continues to work with Orlowski to scan, convert to PDF/A and compress any new paper documents and add them to the archive. This procedure has enabled the association to eliminate paper documents from its archives to the greatest extent possible. The result is faster processes and less time spent on searching for information along with the security of knowing that the documents will remain readable for decades. 

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