Born in 1974, OCR has grown into an advanced (AI), cost-effective (.0015 /page), and accurate (99%+) solution for document processing, yet a recent Level Research study found that 86% of SMB’s continue to enter their inbound data manually – leaving money, efficiency, and accuracy on the table with every keyed piece of paper.
The top-of-mind use cases for OCR are typically Invoice Processing and PO Processing. However, OCR can be used anywhere organizational documents need to be processed in almost any format (ex. Word, Excel, Google Sheets, PDF, Text, JPG, etc.).
Automating workflows utilizing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) with RPA (Robotic Process Automation) result in the following benefits:
Improved Accuracy
A correctly configured OCR workflow can achieve 99%+ accuracy in retrieving text from documents. Handwriting recognition, known as ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition), also continues to advance, thanks to AI and Machine Learning, and can currently achieve accuracy in the 70%-80%+ range. Contrast these percentages with the traditional industry-standard benchmark of 70% accuracy for human data entry.
Cost Savings
Digitally processing documents using OCR results in significant (80%+) reductions in labor vs. manual data entry. For example, a large commercial contractor recently saw a decline in their per invoice handling time from 10 minutes to less than 1 minute utilizing OCR.
Increased Productivity
From a pure processing perspective, the Institute of Finance indicates that a company leveraging automated invoice processing will see a 1,023% improvement in processing throughput over manual entry. Additionally, when OCR processed .PDF copies of documents are then organized and saved to a SharePoint repository using RPA, the content of all documents becomes text searchable—providing rapid searching of digital document repositories.
Greater Security
Data security and risk management compliance are greatly improved by eliminating paper-based documents that can be lost, stolen, or destroyed (with no means of backup). Utilizing secure digital storage of documents minimizes the risks (and storage requirements) of traditional paper-laden filing cabinets.
As you can see, combining OCR and/or ICR with Robotic Process Automation can dramatically improve your current organizational performance and effectiveness. Additionally, OCR enabling your existing paper document workflows form a secure, firm foundation that can quickly scale as your business grows.
Contact us to learn more about how to upgrade your document processing and reap the many benefits that intelligent document automation can provide to your organization and your employees.