Ever wondered about the piles of documents kept at your workplace? Or ever wished to get these documents in an editable and searchable form instead of hardcopy. By scanning all the documents, you can digitize them. But they won’t be editable or searchable. That’s where OCR can give you a hand and make your life easier.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) helps digitize hardcopy documents and make them searchable and editable. Not only this, but it improves your business workflow to a great extent.
OCR technology enables the conversion of physical documents or image to text, making it effortless to access and edit different document formats.
- PDF files
- Digital images
- Scanned Documents
- Hardcopy documents
It is the best way to make inaccessible data accessible with just one click. Every industry is using OCR technology to make their work more streamlined.
According to a report,
Businesses can potentially save 35,000 US Dollars by adopting AI, and they can automate their tasks by 45%,
What is OCR and How Does It Work?
OCR is combined with many technologies, such as AI and machine learning. These technologies convert scanned images with hand-written and printed text into digitized text.
A typical OCR tool works in three steps:
- Image pre-processing
- Character recognition
- Post-processing.
Progress in the machine learning (ML) domain has given OCR new potential, significantly increasing its applications.
You can apply OCR to any real-world scenario that needs identification or text transformation. For example, receipt scanning, traffic sign recognition, license plate recognition, etc.
How is OCR Technology Gaining Ground at the Business Level?
OCR applications in business could improve business workflows to a great extent. It dramatically benefits various industries beyond generating digital versions of handwritten or printed text.
The following are the advantages of OCR technology.
1. OCR Brings in Automation
Businesses work with data these days. Quick and safe access to data is a significant competitive advantage.
But what happens if your company’s data is still in PDF or paper documents? Would you spend all the time collecting data from these hardcopy files manually? Of course not.
According to Goldman Sachs,
“The total costs of old-fashioned, paper-based invoice processing amounted to $2.7 trillion annually. An automated solution can lower these costs by at least 50%.”
Now is the best time to eliminate manually doing this tiring work.
OCR’s most significant advantage is automation—it automates the burdensome data entry tasks. And ultimately eliminates the risk of human error. These small errors might have serious consequences. Especially when it comes to workflows and businesses dealing with sensitive data or those with heavy penalties for making errors. For Example, financial services and pharmaceutical companies.
2. Improves Data Security
Paper documents have a very temporary life. Also, once those hard copies are gone, it’s impossible to backup them.
OCR technology helps you meet your compliance requirements and eliminate the risks that threaten your business. It protects your data and saves the information. It also removes the risk of fraud, document tampering, and alteration.
3. Offers Easy Access
Employees spend 30% to 40% of their time searching for information in hardcopy documents.
With OCR, everything is editable and searchable. You can easily search for any information or document within massive databases by entering a document’s name or reference number. It helps you instantly find numbers, addresses, characters, and other information.
4. Provides Unlimited Storage
Storing documents in the cloud is the way to go if you want searchable and editable documents. You can keep them safe for as long as you want.
It’s pointless to save your company’s sensitive data in paper documents since they are more likely to get stolen, misplaced, or damaged. Paper documents also need ample space, which costs additional money.
OCR solves storage problems and saves your documents online permanently.
5. Boosts your Productivity
Manual data entry is a very tiring task. However, you can replace its tiring manual processes with OCR and automate it.
As this technology transforms daily, investing your time and resources in an OCR tool will surely make you more focused and productive at work.
6. Trims your Cost
OCR decreases your business’s costs to a great extent.
On average, companies get a 31% cost reduction through automation solutions.
For instance, if you run a startup, you won’t have to hire full-time people to manage bulky paperwork. You never have to trust paper once documents have been scanned, so you save.
- Printing
- Copying
- Document distribution costs.
7. Reduced Errors
Manual data entry makes you dedicate much of your day to processing files and documents. That might be prone to errors. It’s easy for anyone to make typing mistakes, forget to mention important details, and misfile documents.
The accuracy rate of OCR is 98%–99%, measured at the page level.
OCR converts all documents in an error-free manner. It significantly saves your time on paperwork and frees you up to focus on more important things.
8. Supports Multiple Languages
Globalization makes information available in almost all languages. But capturing the nuances of a foreign language can be daunting. Modern digital data-capturing tools like OCR make these tasks easy in no time.
OCR converts text into multiple languages. It identifies text in images, recognizes the language, and translates it into another language.
An OCR tool supports 100+ languages.
9. Lower Turnaround Times
Often, much of the data is used again and again. Typing the same data over and over again makes data entry very difficult.
Automation saves you a lot of time and effort. So does OCR!
With this intelligent data capture technology, you can eliminate manual processes, automate your daily document management. It also helps to save 80% of your time.
Optical Character Recognition is an absolute game-changer when filling out forms. OCR identifies information within documents and saves it for later use.
10. Better Customer Service
With OCR, You can instantly access and retrieve customers’ information and solve their problems Asap. It reduces the waiting time for the customers. Ultimately it ensures a satisfying customer experience.
Conclusion
OCR has transformed a lot over the past years. It evolved from a simple analyzer that could only recognise a few fonts to a powerful conversion tool that could read everything printed. OCR’s remarkable growth allows it to perform more than only scan and convert text, such as providing TTS (text-to-speech) to the visually handicapped. It is now at the forefront of digitalization, with the goal of making the world paperless. You can rely on today’s OCR. It is accurate and stable but requires some human interaction when employed. However, the benefits of OCR technology in business are numerous.
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