CM Global Partners Speeds up Data Extraction with Able2Extract

Retyping PDFs Takes Too Much Time

As a company that offers sales compensation consulting on a global scale, CM Global Partners regularly deals with a vast number of PDF files from clients. The PDFs they are dealing with mostly contain financial information in a spreadsheet layout, and they often vary in size. "Data that we need to convert ranges from a few hundred records to over 100,000 with multiple fields" says CM Global Partners CEO, David Cocks. "The PDFs we get are mostly scanned documents that need to be imported into our proprietary software through MS Excel."

At first, the data extraction was done manually, requiring him to assign significant resources to the tedious task. After realizing that manually retyping scanned PDFs into Excel required a lot of time, David and his team started searching for software that could automate the data extraction process, leaving them with more time for analyzing and improving their clients sales efforts. "Over the years," David admits, "my team had tried different products to help extract financial data from PDF and convert to an Excel spreadsheet, which then had to be converted to special files that could be used in our proprietary software, called Compensation Master."

David and his team were intent on finding the most accurate PDF conversion software, since their process requires the data to be completely audited and identical to data in the PDF file. He stresses the importance of accuracy: "If we don't start our process with the right numbers, the whole data set will not be valid. Getting the numbers to match was extremely time consuming."

CM Global Jumps Into The Productivity Pool

After testing out several PDF converters, David and his team found that Able2Extract fit them the best, primarily because of its extensive conversion options. Since their workflow requires them to convert scanned PDF to Excel and ultimately import the data into CompensationMaster, CM Global Partners decided to go with the OCR supported version of Able2Extract - Able2Extract 9 Professional. "Our team spent a fair bit of time searching for a tool that would have the highest accuracy in data conversion and that is when we came upon Able2Extract." David says. "After considerable testing, we found that the conversion of data was much more accurate with Able2Extract and it had more options for data extraction. Also, the ease of use makes it a real winner."

Having found a solution to their problems, David and his team were able to streamline their work almost instantly, increasing the productivity of everyone on the team. The accurate conversions enabled them to get the PDFs into Excel in much less time than before: "We use Able2Extract to convert large sets of data in a matter of hours versus days and even weeks, with extreme accuracy" David says. "Now when we get big data sets from our clients, we don't even hesitate as we know how well Able2Extract can help us."

Able2Extract Brings Supreme Results And More Time

One of the biggest and most notable effects found when using Able2Extract was the time saving factor. Able2Extract saved them 80% of the time normally spent on data extraction, which meant they could assign the additional time to tasks that were more oriented towards designing the new sales compensation programs for their clients. Converted into monetary value, the saved time translates into an average of $15,000 saved. In fact, their biggest saving to date was reported to being over $100,000 on a company with over 10,000 sales employees.

David shares an interesting story:
"On one occasion, we received financial data from a company with over 1,000 sales people and all the reports were in PDF due to output constraints in their internal accounting and sales management system. Normally converting a large quantity from PDF to a spreadsheet for both accounting and sales data for several regions and offices would take a week or more. We were able to extract the data and return the spreadsheet for verification to the company within the same day the PDF's were received. The CFO called us back immediately and said that he was impressed with how we were able to convert the data so quickly."

CM Global Partners is one of the leading companies in applying LEAN to sales compensation, and as such, it thrives on productivity-boosting tools like Able2Extract.

David concludes, "I would definitely recommend Able2Extract because of its ease of use and ability to convert into and out to different file types with a very high degree of accuracy."