Document management remains one of the top challenges for companies. About 21 percent of companies report productivity losses because of document issues.
It’s not going to get easier any time soon as everything becomes digitized. If you want to get a handle on your business documents, you need optical character recognition.
Read on to discover what it is, how it works, and how you can implement it in your business.
What Is OCR?
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It’s a way for a program to recognize text in digital images.
A common application of OCR is with scanned documents. Scanned documents usually come across as Jpg or PDF files. With this application of OCR, you can search the text to find important points quickly.
It’s also possible to search for the document by the text in the document or file name.
The technology plays a critical role for all businesses, not just from a data management perspective. Businesses have to produce and maintain receipts for their expenses.
OCR technology lets you take an image of the receipt. Apps read the text and let you file the receipt or apply it to your accounting software as an expense.
The warehouse industry uses OCR, too. It’s possible for a barcode reader to read text and barcodes.
OCR eliminates manual data entry, improves productivity, and reduces errors because you no longer need manual data entry.
OCR In Action
How does OCR work? It starts with an OCR program and a document.
The OCR document processes the digital image. Programs will read the text and export it. Other programs read and render the text directly in the document.
There are some OCR programs that maintain the document’s layout and formatting while reading the text.
The thing to remember about OCR is that it’s not always perfect. It’s important to review and edit the final output of OCR programs.
OCRs interpret text like you interpret someone’s handwriting. It’s not always possible to get it right all of the time.
How To Implement OCR
If you’re interested in setting up OCR in your business, there are a few ways to do it. You can install an app like Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and use that for PDF documents.
For enterprise applications, you can set up OCR in .Net, Python, C#, and many other frameworks. You’ll need to start with an OCR library, such as Tesseract OCR in C#.
You’ll then use the library to create data files and the directory.
Optical Character Recognition Changes How You Do Business
Optical character recognition can transform your business. It can help you manage documents and find important information easily. You no longer have to spend time on data entry.
Optical character recognition is widely used in the warehouse industry and IT industry. Just about every industry can see positive results from implementing OCR.
Did you enjoy learning about OCR and how it can help your business? You’ll enjoy the other articles on the blog. Check them out today!
