Data is king. Technology allows companies to do more with less in every area and aspect of business. With these new breakthroughs companies gain massive efficiency gains. Enter optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is the electronic and mechanical conversion of text – handwritten or taken from a scanned image. Documents contain majority of the content that powers all business processes.
This makes OCR that much more important for a business to properly understand and precisely implement. OCR will greatly aid in speeding up and improving data ingestion, aid in correctly identifying documents, and extracting content from documents
Efficiencies gained from OCR:
Automatic classification
Intelligently recognizes document types using algorithms and organizes them by business logic
Rapidly extract data
Each field has data extracted using business logic and customized rules (if needed)
Increase data accuracy
Instant data validation
Data extracted can verified against database and business logic; as well as calculations can be made on the data extracted
Learn on the fly
Speed and accuracy increases with more volume
This leads to improving every aspect of the business by better allocating your resources and employees. OCR will lead to faster processing documents which leads to more throughput annually. With the right business logic in place this results in faster payments for your company as well. OCR opens up the door for many creative uses and using your human assets in more productive roles.
Factors to consider before implementing OCR:
Image quality: best practice is to have documents that are 300dpi
Manual data verification: OCR is not perfect and there will always be a need for users to perform manual data entry and verification
Fayez Nazir, ECM Consultant