Blog: Peaks in data entry: too expensive to handle yourself 20 December 2011, by Manolo de la Fuente

It strikes us just how many businesses have to tackle a Christmas peak in their data-entry work. We have

just processed the bulk of the salary savings scheme requests, and next year we will take care of a vast

number of payment slips. In doing so we help relieve banks of their heavy workload, something they

certainly appreciate. Large companies dealing with major streams of incoming forms are noticing that

managing peaks is a business in its own right. I couldn’t agree more.

I believe that banks and insurance companies would be better off outsourcing their data-entry processes. Why?

Simply because it's too expensive to do it yourself, and human resources are limited. You have to recruit and train

temporary staff, without being sure that they will deliver the goods. Why try to cope with the burden of peaks in

salary savings scheme requests? Wouldn't it be a better idea to hire an experienced and professional

organisation?

If there's one company able to deal with peaks, it's PostNL. The masses of Christmas greetings sent in December

doubles mail volumes to almost 30 million items a day. PostNL starts preparing for this peak handling in January,

a full-time job for some of my colleagues.

A lot of the work we do involves video coding, i.e. data-entering postcodes on letters that sorting machines are

unable to read. An image is made of the items and presented on screen to my colleagues, who then read the

postcodes and input the information by hand.

In the past, we had to hire 300 extra people for video coding over Christmas, pulling out all the stops as we

reached peaks of 500,000 images an hour. The temporary staff were recruited and trained well in advance,

producing the following costs:

• The hourly cost of temporary staff, including training;

• The cost of employing 24 permanent staff to deal with training, supervision, communication with temping

agencies, as well as assessing and sometimes replacing the temps;

• The cost of creating 300 extra workstations on top of the 200 already in use.

PostNL moved its peak processing to the Philippines in 2010. Labour is of course much cheaper there and the

quality has been outstanding so far. Right now there are 600 people video coding over there. One thing less to

worry about.

In short, it is better to outsource peak data entry. If you think differently, let me know!

Manolo de la Fuente

nl.linkedin.com/in/manolodelafuente/