Document process automation specialist Readsoft was founded 20 years ago, and Freya Purnell spoke to co-founder Jan Andersson on his recent visit to Australia about the company’s evolution and why there is still enormous room for improvement in the automation space.
Although it has grown to now have subsidiaries in 16 countries, Readsoft began as a two-man start-up. President and co-founder Jan Andersson was working for a company providing solutions to the mail order industry, with hundreds of people employed simply to key in data from order forms and catalogue requests. Seeing an opportunity to create software that could capture the information on the documents, he and co-founder Lars Appelstal put their heads together over a few beers and decided it couldn’t be too hard to create. They were wrong.
“It was very hard actually to build this software. It took us a number of years to do, first in parallel to our normal jobs. When we got funding and we were able to show that this would work to investors and others, we started full-time with Readsoft in 1991 and built the first versions of software that we started to sell in Sweden primarily in 1993,” Andersson says.
Click here to read the full article in the December 2010 edition of Inside SAP.
