Scan, recognize, edit
It's the Digital Age. When people ask for a document, you better be ready to provide that not just in e-form but in a format they require. Today, the company that can handle the most documents in as many formats in the shortest turnaround time possible... wins! So to what do you turn to if your business handles tons of paper files or digital files that constantly need to be converted to some form or the other? Why, you look for the leading OCR solution that enables your business to keep up with demands of course!
OCR is an acronym for Optical Character Recognition, which is the technology used to 'identify characters in a digitized document'. By that definition, you cannot OCR scan a paper file. You first need to scan this paper document into an image file. This resulting image file is then the one that's subjected to the OCR software, which 'reads' the individual characters on the image and renders it as editable text.
How Paper-Based vs Electronic Documents Compare?
OCR Technology in Action
An excellent example of using OCR technology is in the public records domain. Nowadays, you can easily try and find your birth records or look up somebody's DMV or criminal records online. How do you think it got there? Your birth records were most likely filed when your parents filled out a paper form at the city hall of the place where you were born. Years later, due to maintenance reasons, the city hall decides to convert all these paper birth certificates into searchable electronic files.
Why searchable? So that you and millions of others like you can just type your name, birth date or birth place on an online form and find your own birth certificate! The process? Each paper birth certificate was scanned. The scanned documents were then ran through OCR software and the resulting editable text was tagged (e.g., name, birth month, birth day, birth year, etc.)!
You can also imagine how this works for the legal system. Imagine if all the court cases were still on paper. It would take you forever to find a legal case you were interested on either for personal, education or professional reasons if these documents did not run through scanning and OCR conversion tools!
Note too that OCR scanning enables businesses to file documents accurately. For example, a birth certificate may be manually (and incorrectly) filed by someone per the first name, instead of the last name of the person concerned. Imagine the delays it would cost to find the right document! With OCR technology, e-documents can be tagged, filed and found in many different ways instantly! Consider the cost-savings too of maintaining disks of data as opposed to maintaining gigantic storage facilities to house paper documents!
How to Find the OCR Solution that's Right for You
Today, businesses still produce an enormous amount of paper documents but everybody realizes the need for electronic records management. Your need for this may be less or more than the next business owner so ensure that you are signing up with the OCR solution that best suits your needs. To this end, consider OmniPage, which is considered the World's No. 1 OCR Software.
OmniPage gives businesses the opportunity to truly leave the Paper Age behind. So why not go digital?