How to Get the Most Out of Your OCR Tool

Optical Character Recognition makes it easier to create searchable documents, analyze paper documents and digitize documents for permanent storage. As an extremely broad technology, it can be applied to many areas of a business. Here’s how to get the most out of your OCR tool.

Conduct a Business Process Audit. Identify areas in which your business could be improved through digitizing documents, such as by digitizing receipts or tax returns. Train your employees on these new business processes. By integrating OCR into your business strategy, you can take full advantage of it throughout your organization.

Integrate the OCR SDK into Your Organization’s Apps. An OCR SDK can be used to provide OCR features within proprietary and third-party applications. By integrating the OCR SDK, you can provide your employees and customers with a seamless user experience, rather than having to use multiple technologies.

Analyze Your Methods of Scanning Analog Documents. OCR works best when provided clean images that have significant contrast. Experiment with different types of document imports to determine the best way to get reliable, accurate OCR.

Create a Culture of Digitization. By discouraging the use of paper documents and encouraging digitization processes, you can ensure that employees will properly upload and analyze paperwork rather than attempting to keep them analog.

Get the Right OCR Suite. Ideally, your OCR solution will help you create a searchable, central database of your files, which can then be referenced and maintained by all your employees. Advanced OCR solutions provide text analysis, to determine the relevancy of text compared to a sample.

Pair OCR with Machine Learning. When paired with machine learning, OCR is far more effective. Not only are employees able to view digitized documents, but the platform can be used to follow commands such as analyzing text to identify plagiarism and storing contact information from business cards.

Keep Your OCR solutions Updated. Older OCR solutions may not be able to preserve formatting such as tables and columns. Newer generation solutions can preserve a significant amount of formatting, making the documents easier to read and displaying the as intended.

Consider Investing in an OCR Engine. An OCR tool or service may be able to complete large projects for your organization, after which your organization’s own processes may take over. If your organization is currently implementing or transitioning to OCR, this may be the most reliable way.

Through the OCR data capture process, you can streamline document processing and storage. If your organization deals with significant amounts of analog media, it may be beneficial to look into OCR recognition suites. Filestack provides advanced OCR data capture, form reading, analysis, and conversion, scalable to any organization’s needs. Talk to us today or see a demo to start streamlining your document processing systems with Filestack.