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Data capture helps organisations to process forms quickly and more efficiently
Date: 08/06/2008
Today’s methods of data capture give industries powerful capabilities when dealing with forms which have been completed by clients or customers. It is no wonder that hundreds of organisations are now turning to regular use of data capture to process their feedback forms rather than going through the painstaking process of entering these manually into a system.
Data capture involves scanning of relevant forms and using the data entered on these to give feedback or reports to organisations in whatever area they seek to find results.
A popular use of data capture is for admission or enrolment forms for Universities, with thousands of applications being processed using data capture becomes a valuable commodity in capturing the information quickly and having it processed into the system Another useful area for data capture is feedback forms.
In hotel’s for example, cards and feedback forms are often left for customers to share their views on their stay or leave comments and possibly marks out of 10 for each area of the hotel. This gives the hotel a good idea on what is successful and which areas need improving which is always useful when moving an establishment forward.
With the use of data capture the forms are scanned in and each box is defined by a different type such as alphanumeric, tick boxes, multiple choice answers, question boxes or any other format. The answers are then identified with 99.95% accuracy and fed into a set of results which gives managers a total of each tick box ticked in each area of the form.
Staff who have introduced this idea have gained the plaudits when the process was spread throughout other departments in the organisation being recognised for introducing efficiency and better document management to the office workflow.
Many organisations hire temporary data entry staff to catch up or maintain their record entry on to the systems, this simply isn't necessary once data capture is installed.
More industries are taking this step forward to speed up their manual processes. Scanning specialists can happily take your data and have it converted into manageable information to be used where ever necessary. Universities use this method to capture data for enrolment forms, Mortgage companies for application forms and credit companies for personal detail forms. The accuracy of this data ensures the whole process is run much more efficiently. Many organisations are being urged to take this approach to gaining data accurately and at a much faster rate than the time consuming manual process. Finally let's not forget legislation, capturing forms on a system keeps to all data protection laws and leiglation as they can be backed up and kept for 10 years, keeping paper files is a risky choice with risk of fire and flooding always possible.
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