OCR Solutions Development: Top KEY BENEFITS and Use Cases in Various Business Industries.
In recent years, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has become one of the most widely adopted technology solutions for businesses to streamline and enhance their business process. OCR, leveraged together with other advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning, “enables the conversion of scanned images which contain typed, hand-written, and printed text, into machine-encoded text” [1].
With data is increasingly becoming an important asset to businesses in the new digital age, OCR plays an important role in providing businesses the ability to quickly, and accurately process and convert a large amount of data from hard-copy documents into electronic data – which is secure and easily available for access, and sharing outside of premises.
In this article, we take a quick look into OCR and its benefits as well as rising adoption by enterprises and firms in many business industries:
Top Benefits of OCR Solutions in Data Entry
OCR solutions provide several advantages to business, including time and costs saving on data entry and other administrative tasks – as well as streamlining business processes to improve efficiency.
This is particularly critical for businesses whose operations involve large databases of paperwork and require intensive manual data entry to process such data.
#1 Improve Accuracy
When it comes to manual data-entry, one of the major problems is the inaccuracy of data input. OCR, leveraged together other emerging technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) & RPA (Robotic Process Automation), provides the business an effective method to automate data-entry, resulting in a reduction of errors and inaccuracies.
Minimizing human involvement solves the problem of accidentally typing in the wrong information and some other administrative errors, ultimately improve efficiency.
#2 Saving Costs
OCR is a great technology to leverage for a paperless approach. OCR helps replaces physical papers, which takes up time and spaces, as well as incur maintenance and storage costs. This means data can now be extracted and stored in digital format within business systems. As a result, businesses can reduce overheads on storage and maintenance, as well as other costs such as filing, photocopying and printing etc.
Moreover, OCR also eliminates the expensive cost of data loss due to misplacement and disasters.
#3 Enhance data protection
Data stored in the form of hard-copy papers are highly prone to become lost due to human errors, and/or natural disaster, as well as harsh weather conditions. And once those hard copies gone, it’s virtually impossible to retrieve.
OCR technology, coupled with advanced Machine Learning and other technologies, enables quick and automated extraction of data from scanned photos, consequently analyze and store them into the business system. This helps avoid the risk of data loss and mishandling – also allowing the option of recovery in case of hard-copy loss or human-error.
#4 Onboarding Process Improvement
Many financial institutions and start-ups, who provide digital baking services allowing their users to carry out banking and financial activities online, are required to comply with KYC (Know-your-customer) and AML (Anti-Money-Laundering) regulations.
Traditionally, customers are required to type in their personal information from their ID cards/passport which are susceptible to human errors. Again OCR and Machine Learning technologies enable automatic data extraction through the scanned ID/passport, which eliminates manual actions and reduce data entry errors.
With this, the onboarding process becomes much more efficient, the processing time is significantly reduced for end-users, thereby greatly improving their experience.
Sample OCR Solutions Use Cases by Industry
Banking & Insurance
As mentioned above, banking institutions and insurance companies have long been adopters of OCR technologies. Some of the common use cases of OCR in finance and banking include:
- KYC and AML: OCR software solutions provide the ability to automatically extract and recognize and validate data, capturing from the scanned ID cards/passports.
- Cheques clearing: again, hand-written Cheques data is captured from the scanned Cheques for automatic validation and clearing, minimizing human involvements.
These semi-automated processes significantly reduce the waiting time, and allow for more documents and data entry to be completed, all thanks to OCR and other advanced technologies of AI and Machine learning. This benefits both the banks and their customers.
Legal
Law firms and other legal practices are among businesses that handle large amounts of paperwork on a daily basis. Thus, OCR has many applications in the legal industries.
OCR makes virtually all legal related hard-copy paperwork becomes digitally searchable. And thanks to the advancement of technology, OCR is now also available in non-English languages such as Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and many others.
With OCR, quick access to legal files of previous cases has now become available for reference. This provides an advantage for faster case preparation and saves time and costs, makes legal work overall more efficient for law firms.
Conclusion
Today, many businesses have to deal with a large amount of data coming from paper documents, for example – invoices, contracts, forms, receipts, etc. OCR provides numerous benefits to business moving forward with digital transformation.
By capturing, analyzing, storing data in digital formats, businesses can make those data become “structured” and “ready” for advanced analytics, which helps improve decision making and provide insights for long-term business improvements.
Companies that are looking to automate and replace the time-consuming process of manual data entry can start to look into OCR implementation today. OCR technology, done right, can be leveraged to effectively digitize and transfer data from papers into business application systems.
Businesses across industries, ranging from banking, healthcare, and legal to accounting, Fintech have all successfully incorporated OCR technology into their operations, to improve their business processes.
Outsourcing the development of OCR to offshore software vendors can help businesses save costs and reduce time-to-market, gaining advantage in the new era of the digital economy.
TP&P Technology – Trusted OCR-based Software Development Services Provider
TP&P Technology is among the leading software development companies in Vietnam, providing reliable OCR solutions development services for clients across the global market.
Our team of experienced data scientists and machine learning engineers can help you develop innovative OCR software solutions, streamlining business processes, and boost employees’ productivity efficiently. We comply with data security standards and private information protection, ensuring your data remained safe and secure with us.
If you are looking for a trusted OCR solutions development partner, get in touch with us today to talk to our dedicated specialists about your requirements.
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