New-age businesses are keen on migrating to a completely digitized operation. While it is certainly the best way forward, sometimes companies and businesses fail to understand that everything needs to go digital for this dream to come true. Thus, if your organization is thinking of a digital transformation, doing away with the physical documentation culture will also be an imperative requirement.
However, the question here remains, how will you convert the existing set of crucial documents into a digitized form? And even after you digitize the physical documents, how will you interpret data from those?
Optical Character Recognition or OCR is the simple answer to this question. That being said, most organizations have not realized the true potential of this technology yet. The most probable reason behind this is that they do not really know how OCR can benefit their industry or operations in particular.
Therefore, in this blog let us take a look at the most popular uses of this technology, to understand what is OCR software used for.
What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition is a flexible solution that recognizes printed characters from scanned documents/ images or photographs. Advanced OCR software also supports handwritten text recognition.
Basically, the functioning of an Optical Character Recognition software is based on scanning a document and recognizing characters of different fonts and sizes. More importantly, the recognized characters are then converted into machine-encoded text that can later be edited or saved in files of any desirable format.
How Businesses Benefit from OCR
The specific advantages of Optical Character Recognition technology for business operations are as follows:
1. Searching Becomes Easy
Searching for physical documents to obtain some urgently required data is a cumbersome process. Besides, storing and preserving paper documents is an expensive affair. Therefore, by using OCR technology, you can digitize all your paper documents and corporate content and store them in a variety of file formats. When converted into digitized text, you can easily search through this data and obtain the required piece of information within seconds.
2. Eliminate Inefficiencies of Data Entry
Manual data entry is a time-consuming process that requires a lot of expenditure on labor and workforce, along with a high possibility of errors in the typed data. To do away with this act and optimize data handling for business operations, Optical Character Recognition can come in handy. Simply convert the text in paper documents to a digital form, and then copy-paste it to the company portals or other systems like ERP/ CRM etc.
3. Streamline Data Processing
Optical Character Recognition does not just improve the efficiency of data handling, but also of data processing. With OCR, the document processing speed gets accelerated, and the supply of key information stored in application forms, affidavits, etc., becomes efficient for a smoother workflow. Many Optical Character Recognition software also supports scalable batch processing which allows companies to manage and process a large influx of data.
Intelligent Document Processing: Taking OCR a Leap Ahead
A broader expansion of the basic capabilities of the OCR technology led to the discovery of Intelligent Document Processing. This advanced concept is helping thousands of businesses across the globe to do away with all kinds of data handling and processing problems permanently.
Basically, when different types of technologies like OCR, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, etc., are brought together, then their combination enables what we call Intelligent Document Processing. Intelligent Document Processing supported by OCR technology can be beneficial for businesses in many ways.
Firstly, it introduces automation in business data processing through structured data capture from unstructured or semi-structured documents, which eliminates the time constraints of manual processing and improves workflow.
Further, it promotes compliance as it leaves a digital trail which makes auditing easier, thereby allowing you to stick to regulations quite rigidly. Lastly, since it is an agnostic solution, it can be applied to several kinds of business applications in different departments of an organization. Thus, it supports scalability too.
KlearStack’s Intelligent Document Processing
KlearStack’s Intelligent Document Processing solutions are meant for effectively plugging the loopholes in traditional OCR technology. Traditional OCR only scans and converts the document data into a digital form. However, it does not account for relevance and errors. With KlearStack’s IDP solutions, you get a chance to extract relevant data and not just digital text.
With Artificial Intelligence and adaptive Machine Learning algorithms, KlearStack IDP can interpret unstructured data irrespective of text placements and formats; convert it into meaningful forms to deliver actionable insights. By converting raw digitized text into meaningful fields, KlearStack’s IDP offering makes deriving useful data analytics feasible from unstructured data.
What is OCR Software Used For: A Case Study Of KlearStack’s AI-backed OCR and IDP offerings
KlearStack’s Intelligent Data Processing solutions have proven beneficial for several banking clients till now. Our solutions are capable of introducing meaningful automation in the banking sector that helps in eliminating the redundant, time-consuming, and labor-intensive methods of managing and processing data.
KlearStack OCR and IDP solutions transform banking operations in the following ways:
- AI-enabled OCR support helps in faster extraction and validation of bank customer data from various documents like loan applications, invoices, NACH mandate forms, insurance policies, KYC documents etc.
- Loan sanctioning gets expedited with no errors in loan request processing. The turnaround time for loans is reduced by promoting consumer durables loan processing automation.
- Bank representatives’ jobs become easier. They only have to upload digital copies of documents like income certificates, invoices, application forms, etc., on the mobile app. The mobile app further uploads them to KlearStack’s Secure Cloud where these images are processed instantly by KlearStack’s AI-document interpretation technology. Finally, the relevant interpreted data is forwarded to any downstream system like an SDFC app or ERP or web portal etc, where it gets reconciled, and the loan request gets queued for final approval in minutes.
KlearStack’s IDP services have led to 70% effort savings in our partner banks, 200% faster turnarounds for almost all customer requests, and has cut down 10,000 extra hours of work that was required for manual processing.
