"There were lots of mistakes in the process, where bad data would get added in the database. There were several groups of 21 members each in a hierarchal structure, where the senior would randomly check the quality of data entered into the forms. Lots of complaints were coming from customers related to wrong information in their ID cards." Azhar observed the ongoings and introduced several changes. "There needed to be a double data entry system where every scanned form was sent in queues to 2 different operators. Any mismatch in data entry between 2 operators was sent to an examiner, who would manually correct the data. Also, a point-based ranking system was introduced to identify operators with poor data entry skills."

Though the implementation of these minor changes helped to improve the quality of data, there were still several issues in the overall process and data quality. "The fingerprint and photograph qualities, for example, were not good. The scanned photographs and fingerprints could not be properly used for automated recognition. There was also no Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Urdu and each data entry operator interpreted the handwritten forms differently, which led to inconsistent data quality. To overcome these issues, I led a project to implement online registration centers all over Pakistan capable of advanced biometric capturing. The project was called NADRA Swift Registration Centre (NSRC)."

The first NSRC was launched in November of 2001 in Rawalpindi as a pilot project for the duration of 3 months. The center was launched with 8 data entry stations and it began registering approximately 300 customers per day and quickly become very popular.

"Despite reservations and resistance from some members, we implemented something unique in Pakistan that was focused primarily on customer convenience and gathering quality data. Each center had a number of data entry terminals that would take information directly from customers and feed it directly into computers without using any paper forms. The center also had biometrics equipment, a server with RAID storage and some networking equipment that would connect all the terminals through a LAN and provide WAN connectivity to the head office."

In this scenario, the customer would verbally give his information, which would be directly fed into the system.