Most of you have heard the phrase ‘Work smarter not harder’. We’ve got nothing against hard work or hard working people, but it’s usually the smarter workers that get the job done more quickly and efficiently. That’s exactly what Optical Character Recognition or OCR does for your business documents – gets the job done more quickly & efficiently, without you even breaking a sweat.
What is OCR?
OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a software that extracts text based data from PDF files, scanned documents & images. This data is useful for ensuring faster document search, creating future business plans, analyzing user behavior, and much more.
OCR is one of the most sought after digital tools in the business world today, thanks to its ability to completely erase manual data extraction & indexing. Up until the 1970s, before the OCR technology was officially released, businesses had a separate set of employees who were required to extract data & index scanned documents. Because scanned documents didn’t have a text based format and were not editable.
Needless to say, this was an utter waste of time, and also cost the businesses a superfluous amount of money. But with the newly developed OCR technology, computers were finally able to recognise almost every digital font, making scanning & extracting text even from non-text based documents possible.
Today’s OCR tools have advanced to such an extent that they can even extract hidden attributes of your documents, like location of the document on the server, attached templates, name of the author, name of the editors, comments, file properties, and much more.
How does OCR reduce documentation workload?
No matter which field of business you are in, scanning documents & extracting data from them is a necessity for all. This process of extracting & indexing data from documents forms a major chunk of your daily business schedule. But with an OCR based software, you can completely eliminate the need for extracting data & indexing documents manually.
Let’s say you scan a few invoices, and you want to extract the invoice number, date, amount & payment mode from them. The moment your scan is finished, OCR will automatically recognize all text & numerical information in the invoices, and extract & store all that information in a text based format for your reference. Let’s take another example.
Let’s say your client shared an invoice with you, but in the form of a picture or image. OCR will repeat the same process for the image, and extract all text & numerical information from the image & convert it into text, making it easier for you to catalog the information you require. This way OCR reduces 90 percent of your document indexing workload.
Software that comes with OCR, like document management software, project management software & document conversion software, can extract & index information from thousands of documents within minutes. The process is completely automated, and saves enormous amounts of time for businesses worldwide.
GLOBODOX’s OCR
Our document management software GLOBODOX is also equipped with an OCR feature that compliments other attributes of the software, like faster metadata based search, document organizing, automated indexing, and much more. Let’s see how it does that.
GLOBODOX’s OCR automatically extracts data or metadata from each uploaded or scanned document, which is useful to organize documents into their respective document type or stack. Organizing documents into document types or stacks allows you to segregate your documents into easily identifiable groups, based on their content, client, project, department, etc.
The extracted metadata can also be used as search keywords or phrases, to make document searches a lot easier. And it does all of this, while completely automating your document indexing process, and reducing your data extraction & indexing workload by nearly a 100 percent. And although there are plenty of OCR tools available on the internet today, they lack the security & integration capabilities that GLOBODOX can provide.
GLOBODOX’s OCR & other document management features have been the cornerstone of efficiency & productivity growth for thousands of businesses around the world. And if you too would like to automate your data extraction & document indexing processes, visit www.globodox.com.
