Making Sense of a Document Mess

The story repeats itself again and again; companies have built up volumes of documents over time for all sorts of reasons, but they have no idea what to do with them. Law firms, for example, could have entire floors in building dedicated to paper documents simply because they don’t want to let go of the sorting system with all the files, risk losing the documents, and they don’t have a practical way to convert the information to digital format.

Solving the Document Value Problem

The whole reason documents are kept has to do with the information on them. While there are documents that have signatures for approval, such as contracts, the high majority are simply records of data. Whether written text, in spreadsheets, or visuals, every page of every document in every folder is simply a repository of information. 

While it is possible to translate the information into a digital system by hand, there’s always the risk of translation and information loss due to human error. So, the documents are kept and companies spend thousands of dollars to maintain them.

Another problem that has grown significantly today involves documents with personal information. The fact is, most states have passed laws requiring companies to protect that information and make sure it’s not released at the risk of the person it is about. That also works as a barrier to just handing the paperwork over to just anyone to convert it to digital format. Without knowing how the documents are handled or where they could go, it would be a high risk for a company to let them go.

The above leaves a company in a bit of a pickle. Most businesses today know they need to manage information in a digital format. It can be protected better, accessed easier, and scanned faster for key information that is needed. To do that, however, a business needs to invest in more than just simple scanning.

What is Scanning Today?

Most folks are familiar with scanning in the sense that it works like a copier machine, taking an image of document and saving it to an electronic file. That said, it doesn’t mean that the document is read. In fact, the most basic scanning is literally just an image and no data.

The second level would be optical character recognition, or OCR. An OCR scan makes a copy of the image, but also reads anything that is an alphanumeric character on the document. Doing so, it provides that text and character recognition to the document. This makes it not only possible to search the electronic document, the document files can then be searched for relevant information as well. 

However, while this level is powerful, it’s also prone to a lot of mistakes. Where the text image is clear, OCR has a fairly accuracy of conversion. But where the images are smudged, fuzzy or even handwritten, OCR begins to fail. The result will be characters that are incorrect, misspelled words, incorrect numbers and so on.

The next level is what is now known as intelligent OCR. In this level, intelligent OCR fills the gap between clear images of text and numbers and the fuzzy, smudged and similar unclear alphanumeric material. 

This accuracy is driven by software algorithms that go through all the possibilities of what a text scan could be and then makes a best guess based on calculations. This approach has proven to be extremely powerful and very accurate, even with handwritten characters.

Shifting the Paradigm

With advanced OCR scanning, businesses can now do what they always wanted to, intelligently convert volumes of documents to a digital format and do it internally, safely and in a secure manner. It’s a gamechanger for record translation and archive protection.