“Optical Character Recognition” How your computer can save, time, money and reduce stress?

At its heart Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is more accurate, saves time and money by doing what computers do best, removing the mind-numbing and repetitive tasks that bore most folks to tears, “Manual Data Entry”.  Remember, OCR doesn’t need to be perfect it just needs to be better than the manual process it’s replacing!

Benefits of OCR

1. Time and Money Saved: OCR solutions allow a company to achieve more productivity as it enables fast extraction of data. The effort and time that employees put in to extracting relevant data can be utilized to focus on more important processes.
2. Security: Organizations give utmost importance to security of their critical business documents. When data is in digital format the threat from natural disasters such as, flooding, fires, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions as well as theft is minimized. Also, access can be better controlled to avoid mishandling of data and documents.
3. Traceability:Information Governance, e-discovery, audits—it’s difficult to make sure all of them are being satisfied by manual entry because much of the manual process is undocumented and thus untraceable. OCR automated extraction can record a visible trail of the data extraction process. 

Issues and Solutions

All OCR systems are rated by their manufacturers at an accuracy level of above 99%. This is because if the software sees an “S” and thinks it’s a “5” it will return the value as a “5” and call it “accurate”… But, by doing so, you now have bad data. Most users reduce the accuracy to around 80%. This process allows a person to review what are known as, “exceptions”, these are the pieces of data that the OCR are not quite sure of. The OCR does the majority of the work and the human only needs to clean up what the OCR misses. With the speed and  accuracy of  software and with humans, only needing to deal with the exceptions, your staff can do more with less stress. This gives them time to engage in more productive tasks. You’ll have the peace of mind knowing that your data is at the highest rate of accuracy possible.

Time for your thoughts

Do you currently use OCR?

What data are you gathering?

Do you agree with the contents of this posting?

Please post your thoughts in the comment section below… Thank you for your feedback.