Document Conversion News Articles from Pearl Scan Solutions
OCR A useful business tool
Date: 07/07/2010
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is now being used more frequently by businesses looking to reduce the time spent on data entry.
This comes from a realisation of its advantages and due to the fact that the capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) software has increased sufficiently in the past ten years. Many organisations don’t realise that automated forms processing has been used successfully for some time.
There are now more intelligent recognition engines and more developed memory technologies available which help automate the processing of any office documents such as invoices, cheques and surveys. This is now a proven effective alternative to the time-consuming and therefore costly manual processes.
An organisation could actually automate the extraction of any relevant data from static locations on documents such as credit applications or registration forms which eliminates the need for the usual manual data entry. These documents would have the data located in the same place on each form. Standard OCR solutions have a process, where users select the required type of data to be extracted based on its location on the form using zones (e.g. Surname). Any other sections on the form, such as logos and field descriptions (e.g., ‘Work Telephone’) are not processed. This is a reliable method of collecting the data you require consistently from forms structured in the same manner.
The accuracy is around 99.995% so errors are a rarity. Many organisations that use enrolment forms such as Universities or feedback forms such as Hotels would benefit significantly from OCR as all of the information from the forms could instantly be fed into the system and reports can be quickly and easily generated from the results.
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