OCR and how it can affect your document management system
Every business saves its documents in ways that it finds most suitable, but when documents are lost or not easily found, problems arise. In this day and age, OCR is transforming the capabilities of acquiring and retaining documents and it’s no longer a question how this invention is an absolutely crucial machine to any business.
OCR or Optical Character Recognition converts images of text into a digital machine-readable format. Before OCR was invented, this process was handled manually where people would have to type each document into a computer, making mistakes
a major factor. But with OCR, the process is faster and much less prone to those mistakes. The conversion of a hard copy to a soft copy leaves documents open to editing, storing at demand, formatting, and searching. This technological advancement is without a doubt a necessity in every business needs analysis, because constantly seeking enhancement in business performance is a smart strategic approach that any company should adopt and implement. When we say a smart strategic approach, we mean every word as we know how absolutely important digitalization within a corporation is to help it stay away from wasted time, wasted resources, and lost documents.
A document management system or DMS is the system used to receive, track, store and manage electronic documents. Here comes the significance of OCR as it is the tool that brings those electronic documents to life by scanning them from their original physical state making them editable and formable. This is the best route any office should take on their journey to go completely paper free.
However, an OCR system should possess a number of qualities for you to ensure that your integration process from hardware to software is reliable. It should be fast, accurate and of an editable output format. Yes, we have learned by now that OCR converts images into editable text, but you should note that there are different types of output formats it generates and sends back to your document management system according to your pre-settings. For example, you have a check that you want to input into your DMS and you have processed it through your OCR engine, now an Image over text PDF format has been generated. This format is not editable to preserve the scanned document in its original state. The text however is still created by OCR and saved in the back making the document fully searchable. In other cases, and more commonly, OCR generates text based formats where the document is re-typed with as much fidelity to the original content as it can. Those documents are fully editable as well as searchable. When it comes to accuracy, this may be the most important factor an OCR engine should possess. Most of the time, printed out documents that are scanned are not very clear or of good quality making it harder for OCR engines to 100% correctly read them. Lines of dots, distortion, patchy colors, and blotches somehow find their way to a scanned document almost every time. That is why the accuracy of the conversion is essential to sidetrack erroneous outputs. But how can you guarantee high accuracy rates? One way is to choose an OCR engine that uses a large number of steps in its algorithms to increase accuracy, uses confidence scoring on results of the data ingestion process, improves engine precision on a regular basis, and uses support to assist in developing the OCR engine to fit your specific use. And of course, an OCR engine with high-speed processing is highly recommended especially when you have large numbers of documents to convert.
Now that you know how integral OCR is to your document management system it is not less important to acknowledge the benefits the latter reflects on any business. Document Management is now available in a variety of configurations, ranging from small stand-alone applications to large scale enterprise-wide deployments with standard document filing functionalities, keeping documents in a safe place with the ability to find them easily and quickly. With a document management system any business will levitate to more functionality with less paper usage, more storage capacity with less used up spaces of file cabinets and warehouses, and the usage of systems that share features such as electronic indexing, version control that helps track any changes made to those electronic documents by any user, and much more.
