Electronically Captured Data and the Competitive Edge It Gives Your Company

Are you spending too much time physically handling paper documents in your organization? Like most companies, you are flooded daily with the creation of documents, reports, proposals, stats sheets, as well as, countless documents which come to you every day.

Rather than physically handling each document and passing it along to the appropriate responsible party, there are document capture process systems in place today that eliminate the manually handling and recording of such documents. Welcome to the digital world.

By scanning your paper documents, you are able to view, archive, and retrieve your important data electronically with online images. It is the input of data, electronically captured, which affords many companies a competitive edge.

Most recognizable, and a very easy example to understand, is how a barcode reader at your supermarket checkout counter works. While recording your sale, it captures the inventory related data. Most likely, you may also be using a store shopping card, which identifies you as the person making the purchase. If your purchase is paid for using a credit card, then additional information is captured along with your purchase.
We take the above example of inventory capture, pretty much for granted now; it's been around for a long time. Now let's imagine the same level of efficiency with your every day documents.

Electronically captured data can be very beneficial to an organization for a number of reasons but the manipulation of the electronic data gives companies a competitive edge:

• Eliminates need for manual data entry from documents as the data is captured electronically and directly into the computer system

• Electronically stored documents make for easy archive and access from any desktop, anywhere in the world

• Distribution of documents is much easier electronically rather than physically

• Searchable text makes it easy to find the document(s) you are looking for

• Physical storage space is dramatically reduced for your document retention

• Security and access to sensitive data is controllable.

Not all documents are limited to black and white text. Most organizations will also need to deal with complex documents with color graphics. Some examples include: engineering specifications, criminal evidence, property descriptions and photographs, exhibits, charts, and drawings to just name a few.

By simple definition, data capture is the the collecting and entering of data in a computer, or the conversion of data into a form compatible with computers. A process is put into place when a company has a need to capture vast amounts of information from documents.

Also known as simply capture forms. A typical data capture form will have a fill-in-the-gaps format, often having boxes to enter details of company name, requisition number, etc. The data captured on the forms is then scanned or manually entered into a database. Here are some easily recognizable examples of data capture forms you have probable already used:

• Patient data from health service organizations

• Registration forms and feedback surveys from hotels

• Enrollment forms for schools, colleges, universities, churches

• Job application forms

• Customer application forms for banking

• Building and equipment maintenance records

• Safety forms

Often confused with optical character recognition (OCR), data capture is more complex and valuable to an organization. Unlike OCR, data capture software captures specific, targeted data, usually from a form, that is required to support a business process. OCR is just the basic conversion of any scanned alphanumeric information into a machine readable digital form.

While capturing data from structured forms is a fairly well-understood process, most companies have a great deal of 'unstructured' data to also consume. By unstructured, we mean relevant information that could be found almost anywhere on a page. Invoices would be a great example, as there is no common standard and each of your suppliers will have their own form. In the example of an invoice, not only are you interested in matching vendor information to your records but it would also be helpful to associate their invoice number to your purchase order.

Data capture services can be configured to the unique needs of your organization with the ultimate goal of improving your business processes. Typically solutions are offered on a single platform to capture data, whatever formats and wherever the needs are across your enterprise organization. Considering the mobility of your workforce, systems cater to input from any combination of paper, tablet PC, or web form. Systems today offer concurrent processing of hand-printed and handwritten forms, invoices, checks, correspondence, and any other document type, thus reducing your operating costs and increasing your productivity with a short payback.