Mubasher: The UK-headquartered Kodak Alaris business has played a leading role in the digital transformation journey of the Gulf Bank of Kuwait (GBK), according to a recent press release.

GBK announced it has digitised 50 million documents by using scanners from Kodak Alaris, a manufacturer and marketer of traditional photographic supplies, hardware, and software for digital imaging and information management, and retail printing kiosks.

The digitisation process has reduced physical storage space in addition to huge cost savings, as document retrieval currently takes just a few clicks after it used to take weeks to be done.

GBK decided a few years ago to maintain its position as the leading financial institution in Kuwait amid the digital era.

“We had millions of documents that were stored across various branches and had to be retained as per regulatory requirements. Besides the huge costs involved in storing the mountains of documents, there was also the risk of damage and loss due to fire, theft etc.,” a spokesperson from GBK’s IT department said.

The spokesperson added, “When a document was misplaced, the amount of time spent on retrieval increased exponentially. Digitising these documents and implementing a DocSearch Retrieval tool was imperative.”

Storing documents in paper format was very expensive with a risk of damage and loss, as well as unsecured paper handling, the press release noted.

“Microfilm made retrieval of documents tedious & time-consuming, requiring manual effort to go through the complete film roll to locate a particular document since there was no indexing,” the statement added.

Ashraf & Co has developed and implemented the DocSearch tool in-house for GBK with a ‘self-service’ capability that helps users retrieve any document type in minutes.

Mohammad Rashed at Ashraf & Co commented, “We are an Alaris Elite partner and are committed to promoting the company’s solutions in Kuwait because the company’s solutions consistently exceed our expectations and the requirements of our customers.”