Your organization may have stacks of documents waiting to be processed or electronic documents languishing in system file folders. Buried within those documents is business-critical data waiting to be released to the workflow process to be captured, validated, stored and most importantly, mined. The data could provide relevant and important facts that will impact business decisions and strategies, and your executive team wishes the data were there yesterday.

Better Decision-Making Capabilities

While a lot of surveys are conducted online these days, the need to conduct telephone surveys, face-to-face interviews, phone interviews and phone questionnaires remains relevant for many organizations that are at the initial stages of gathering feedback.

Imagine an insurance provider that’s just hired a marketing research firm to better understand its recent drop in enterprise-level customers.  You begin conducting face-to-face interviews with a segment of existing customer base and ask:

“Do you have any suggestions about how to improve the customer experience and services here?”

The interviewer can then explore any vague answers given (e.g., improve the claims process) with further follow-up questions (e.g., Do you mean faster processing of claims within a certain timeframe? And, do you need easier access to or more detailed information about our denials of claims?)

Advanced data capture techniques can allow the insurance company to not only capture the relevant information, but then feed the answers into a system that can measure  demographics, and preferences of their customers. Once data is “interpreted” it can influence investment decisions and even marketing and branding strategies.

Facilitate Data Sharing

Nowadays, it is expected that companies open up their data platform to its vendors and partners to give more insights and visibility towards key operational data. The first step in this strategy would be to implement an effective data capture strategy to gather important information from documents such as forms, invoices, purchase orders and remittances as well as shipment information like bills of lading.

Take an example of data sharing between retailers and suppliers. Data sharing between suppliers and retailers can lead to insights that add value to both parties. Companies that are committed to collaborative data sharing can see immediate ROI, as they are able to control out-of-stock issues and manage inventory through forecasting and replenishment.  More accurate demand forecasts, better product introductions, and improved customer experiences are all benefits associated with this type of data sharing.

Once the data has been shared, suppliers can then deploy business intelligence software that can extract and centralize data from a variety of sources and formats, to present information in a timely, yet comprehensive, way.

Unsearchable

For years, OCR has remained the process by which typewritten (not handwritten) text in an image is recognized and converted into editable and searchable digital content. This is a useful tool for anyone who wants to add a search function to the material they’ve scanned. Searchable text simplifies image retrieval and reuse.

While that search can be quite helpful, ICR takes it a step further.  For instance, what if you wanted to use an intelligent search to compare a tax identification number you retrieved on each document in a batch against all the other documents in that batch.  Sure, you could write a program to do that or manually scan the entire batch for each instance of the tax id (depending on the size – and the time you have, of course).

Once the data has been retrieved and outputted in a contextual format, it becomes rather easy for anyone to do this—a Microsoft Excel user, a database user via query, etc.

Advanced Compression, PDF Encryption and highly accurate OCR are great first steps to take technologically to overcome some of the above challenges.

Searchable, Easily Shared Data for Improved Decision Making

At Parascript, our goal has always been to help businesses achieve the highest level read rates with the lowest possible error rate using our machine learning software.  With the latest version of our software, we’ve introduced the first commercially available data location, extraction and verification solution that deploys template-less, neural network-based document data extraction.

The result is significantly faster production with more reliable and refined results for Parascript clients.

For more about Parascript’s advanced ICR and unconstrained handprint recognition capabilities, see the following: