TUSTIN, Calif., April 9 -- Scantron Corporation, an acknowledged leader of data collection solutions, survey services and technical support and maintenance, today announced an agreement with Vista, California-based Cardiff Software, Inc. to resell its TELEform Information Capture System throughout North America. The agreement allows Scantron to continue to leverage its dominance of the turn-key testing and scoring markets while penetrating the broader market of automated forms processing and document capture. Cardiff TELEform will be sold through the newly formed Scantron Imaging Division. We wanted the best product available, and went through a careful and extensive evaluation of the leading forms processing vendors worldwide,'' said Mike Stuhley, vice president, Imaging for the Scantron Imaging Division. In the end it became clear that Cardiff stands alone in the quality and breadth of their paper and Internet forms processing solutions, and clearly has the best infrastructure to ensure the success of their implementation partners.'' TELEform is used by financial organizations to automate the processing of loan and credit applications; pharmaceutical organizations to process case report forms and drug-trial applications; health and insurance organizations to process patient encounter and claim forms and public and private organizations to automate the processing of surveys, time cards and other high-volume forms. “Automated data collection and form processing is a rapidly growing application segment, one that will accelerate as organizations search for ways to reduce costs and increase worker productivity,'' said Emmanuel de Boucaud, vice president for Channel Sales at Cardiff. The selection of Cardiff and TELEform puts Scantron in a prime position to capture a significant portion of that market opportunity.'' According to estimates from the primary research and analyst firms, organizations spend approximately $360 billion each year to manually process paper forms. Cardiff TELEform can reduce the costs associated with manual processing by 90 percent or more, using OCR and advanced recognition software to convert hand print into digital information. TELEform also increases productivity by up to 900 percent through automated cleansing and validation of data using database comparisons and business-rules processing. In addition, TELEform's turn-key Connect Agent technology seamlessly loads information into database, XML and image archive systems. Atlanta-based John H. Harland Company (www.harland.net) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol JH.'' Harland is a leading provider of software and printed products to the financial institution market. Harland's software solutions include, loan origination software, database marketing, host processing and mortgage services. Harland's printed products offerings include checks, direct marketing and financial forms.