Ricoh Company, Ltd., is a highly respectable leading supplier of office automation equipments, including copiers, facsimile machines, data processing systems, and related supplies. In 1997, with the up-rising of the Internet era, Ricoh was striving to create an unparalleled high-quality high- efficiency image communication product line.

ExperExchange, established in 1990, is a leading provider of OCR and software services. Since 1994 Ricoh started to embed the core technology from ExperExchange into its products. With the setup of the new business strategy in 1997, Ricoh started to embed the technology into its additional major products. In 2002 ExperExchange successfully completed the development of the OFC (Optical File Conversion) component, and became a strategic partner of Ricoh Company.

"With the New Business Strategy, ExperExchange is Our Best Choice Due to the OCR Requirements on All Our Major Products."

With the setup of the new business strategy in 1997, Ricoh started to launch a series of digital document solutions, including the Desktop Binder, ScanRouter , and eCabinet product lines, embedded with ExperExchange'core OCRs technology. "We have done a benchmark study on a number of providers as we were searching for a partner that carries OCR technology," said the Project Manager of OFC product line, "Eventually ExperExchange gained our trust with their excellent technology and software development services. The past nine years of agreeable cooperation proved that we made the right decision at the very beginning."

In February 2002, Ricoh released GlobalScan as a new product, which enabled Ricoh's Aficio multifunction products to quickly scan, capture and distribute documents directly to email. It was ExperExchange who significantly contributed to the project, and GlobalScan was widely received by and highly appreciated by its customers in a very short period of time.

ExperExchange completed the development on the component for GlobalScan – the Optical File Conversion (OFC). OFC not only included an embedded OCR technology from ExperExchange, but also contained new functions that optimized the GlobalScan application. There were three modules in OFC: OFC Service, OFC Control Panel, and File Conversion Module. The project lasted for three months, among which Ricoh requested additional functions twice, exponentially increasing the difficulties in development and quality assurance. However, the ExperExchange team did a great job in meeting the new requirements effectively with excellent quality. In the end, ExperExchange completed the functions like folder monitoring, image document recognition, output format conversion, and result returning back to customers.

"Their engineers have done a great job, especially the folder monitoring and document conversion administration. I used to be highly concerned about these two issues that might cause a delay, but I was surprised that they managed to handle the two areas without any issues", said the Project Manager at GlobalScan.

A Successful Project Relies On a Good Process That is Followed by Everybody

"I have over 20 years experience in software development and project management, the way I judge a developer is not how many development languages he commands, but rather whether he follows a good development process" commented the, GlobalScan Project Manager, "We have always received complete documentation and clear code from ExperExchange. From our experience it is not just because they have the best project managers, but rather a good process that every team member follows". At ExperExchange, everybody is aware of the essence of following a good process and it becomes the engineering routine. "We have a complete code standard, some might argue that we should allow our team to be creative in code style. However, we believe that a balance needs to be achieved between individuality and efficiency. Code standard does not prevent us from being creative, but it prohibits us from making unnecessary mistakes", ExperExchange's Senior Architect stated. In addition to the code standard, there are also a number of good habits that ExperExchange's team inherited, which is constantly maturing and developing, e.g. the code cross-review, which ensures the overall high quality of the software project by ExperExchange.

Ricoh Invited ExperExchange to Participate in The Exhibit at Comdex, And The Strategic Partnership Established Between The Two

"It is a typical win-win situation between Ricoh and ExperExchange in its nine years of collaboration, "Not only did we acquire the OCR technology from ExperExchange, their offshore software development capabilities saved us significant development cost and decreased our time to market" said the Engineering Director of Ricoh. In 2002 the two parties established a strategic partnership, and ExperExchange was invited to participate in the exhibit with Ricoh on its new product lines at Comdex in November that year.

Technology

Platform: Microsoft Windows 2000
Programming Language: Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0
Environment: Microsoft Windows 2000, IIS 5
Tools: Microsoft Visual Studio
Bug Tracking: Abnormal Tracking System
Source Control: Visual SourceSafe
Testing: WinRunner
Install Program: Installshield 8.0

About ExperExchange, Inc.

ExperExchange is a leading customer-centric outsourcing provider that specializes in software development, IT consulting, and business process outsourcing services to accelerate the client's profitability and enable them excel beyond the outsourcing limits with our excellence in identifying and executing the appropriate outsourcing methodology. We deliver superior IT solutions and services by leveraging an integrated onsite / offshore development model - our proprietary OSE (Offshore Software Engineering) Model. A list of our services includes software and application development, software quality assurance, cross platform development and porting, internalization and localization, support and maintenance, system conversion and migration, system integration and implementation, data processing, call center, and IT consulting. For more information, visit www.experexchange.com.

ExperExchange and the ExperExchange Logo are registered trademarks and TypeReader is a trademark of ExperExchange, Inc. Other brands and names are the property of their respective owners.