Every industry has to maintain a record of their customers as well as employees to keep it safe. The data can be saved manually through written documents or paper invoices but it is not too secure. There is a chance of data breaching or other frauds in the manual data processing. As data processing is the need of every industry. That’s why many businesses are coming towards digital data processing. To shift towards digital data processing, there is a big challenge for many organizations such as the finance and education departments to digitize their previous records first and then automate their ongoing processes.
In doing so, organizations have to hire a large number of employees to enter data into the system, which is a time taking process. It also cost organizations extra expense to digitize the previous records. There is a dire need to have an automated system that reduces the resource and saves time. Optical character recognition OCR Technology helps businesses to reduce manpower to automate the data entry process. Let’s have a quick overview of OCR services.
Table of Contents
OCR Services
OCR solutions are used to fetch data from any document such as images, paper invoices, etc, and convert it into electronic form. OCR document scanners can extract data from any document within seconds. AI-powered OCR technology supports multilingual documents of different languages. It also helps businesses to confirm the identity of their customers by extracting the required data from the documents. Due to the integrity of the OCR scanner app, many businesses, especially financial organizations, are adopting this technology worldwide. According to a source, North America is the top user of OCR services till 2018, and the global market size of OCR is expected to reach $13.38 billion by 2025.
OCR Supported Documents
OCR is a hybrid technology that is a combination of artificial and human intelligence. OCR screening can be done on both structured and unstructured documents.
Unstructured Documents
In unstructured documents, photos, social media content, PDFs (You can use edit PDF online), and handwritten documents are screened by OCR scanners. These documents do not follow any standard template and the information is not placed in a proper format. In unstructured documents, the data is a bit difficult to extract by OCR scanner.
Structured Documents
These documents follow a standard template and the information is presented in a well-structured format. The data is extracted from piles of documents and converted into electronic form. Structured documents include ID cards, driving licenses, passports, utility bills, legal filings, tax documents, financial statements, and many other documents to facilitate the businesses to perform ID authentication processes and help in the digitized data processing.
Semi-Structured Documents
They fill the gap between the structured and unstructured documents and they do not follow any specified format. These documents follow a basic format that is a bit easy for OCR scanners to extract the required information as compared to unstructured documents. Semi-Structured documents include paper-based business records, e-mails, purchase and sales orders, official letters, receipts, etc.
How does OCR Solution Helps Businesses?
After the introduction of OCR technology, millions of businesses adopt this technology worldwide. Because it extracts the required information within seconds with high accuracy. OCR services help businesses to onboard their customers, manage accounts sheets, and reduce paperwork. The AI-enabled OCR system used machine learning and NLP algorithms that enhanced the accuracy of OCR services. These services are used by different businesses all around the world. Let’s discuss which organizations are using OCR solutions extensively.
Use Cases of OCR Technology
Financial Institutions
Financial institutions include more paperwork. So, they used OCR solutions for claim handling, mortgage processing, account management, customer onboarding, account opening, loan applications, compliance-related processes, and many other processes.
Healthcare
Hospitals and other medical institutes used OCR technology for billing and claims processing, health insurance, and maintaining patient records.
Manufacturing Industry
Here OCR scanner is used for sales order processing, accounts payable/receivable, customer’s orders, and remittances.
Online Stores
They used OCR services for account opening, Invoice and bill processing, Customer document verification.
Government Institutions
Government organizations are using OCR for immigration requests, education system, and
passport management applications.
Human Resource Department
OCR solutions are also used in the HR department for employee onboarding, fetching important information from candidate resumes, HR records processing, and storing legal documents.
Software as a Service
OCR is used for expanding online storage solutions, document conversion in cloud storage, document verification, and data extraction.
Conclusion
AI-based OCR services facilitate firms by easing the data entry process to digitize their records. It reduces manpower and time with cost-efficient solutions. OCR technology also helps businesses to verify their customers in real-time by extracting the required data. It eliminates repetitive data and improves data security supporting all platforms such as iOS, Android.
