General manager at ORG-Marg, Sujit Das Munshi, said that the company has selected DigiForms, a software developed indigenously by Boshu Technics Corporation for the purpose. ORG-Marg, which carries out regular audits for a whole host of products including fast-moving consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, softdrinks and consumer durables, handles huge volumes of data, before it condenses this into its final report.

In other words, what will now happen is that whenever a certain piece of data is received by the audit firm, it would be fed into an automated system which would store this in a centralised system. This data could be accessed at the touch of a button.

Commenting on the advantages of the software, Munshi said that the data processing is expected to come down by at least 30 to 40 per cent. In other words,the massive retail census, which the company carries out on a yearly basis, will now take only three to four months instead of the normal six months.

``We will use the latest technology to eliminate the data entry process and thereby limit the scope for error,'' says Munshi. According to him, the software takes in the scanned image of the hand-filled form and converts it to a machine-readable format. The intelligent character recognition technology of the software then compares the characters with a huge and complex database in-built into it.

Once the recognition of characters is over, the software pushes forward other doubtful characters for verification by user. The data then can be transferred to any database system for any further processing. ``Simply put, the new technology will increase our efficiency and improve upon our process time,'' Munshi added.

The company has also invested in specialised data analysing software that allows its clients to access ORG-Marg data in a customised manner. Theimplementation of DigiForms will be in a four-phased manner and ORG-Marg has spent Rs 50 lakh so far for the purpose.

On the future plans, Munshi said: ``We will invest in the latest systems for capturing field information on-line. Once the basic telecom infrastructure is created, we will make more investments in this area.

'' ORG, since its inception in the 1960's, had been investing in IT infrastructure. ``We were one of the few to use IBM 1401 for processing data way back in 60's,'' he said. What ORG-Marg also plans to do is to create an automated database of all the research that it has carried out for top corporates over a period of over 30 years. Once again this huge resource of data would be available to all its clients enabling them to draw on their past experience with clients.