Hidden value propositions

Document automation has it's obvious value: to decrease the cost of running a paper base business, but there are some other areas to gain value from document automation technology, not always monetary, that some companies are finding to be even more important.

Improved Employee Efficiency:
Very often organizations have salaried employees who's job description is not data-entry but are doing data-entry work. It's often overlooked because the data-entry portion of their job is ad-hoc and not at tremendous volume. When the data-entry task is removed from these employees plate they are able to dedicate more time to their job responsibilities and increase their efficiency. This is most often seen with accounts payable clerks. The value of this is that the salary paid to these employees is now used on more critical thinking tasks.

eDiscovery Ready:
No one wants to be involved in a lawsuit, but they happen. When they happen being ready is critical. Courts will expect you to produce data that is accurate and produce it quickly. You will want to be able to produce that data at a low cost, and not more information than you have too. Document automation and OCR technologies are a critical part of this. Paper in file cabinets are very costly to review and collect for a case, but OCRd documents that are properly filed are easy to search and retrieve. This makes you eDiscovery ready at a lower cost and greater efficiency. The value is a reduced cost and risk when and if a lawsuit happens.

Compliance:
Regulation can come from government or industry. Companies who are not complaint risk penalties or even worse. Document automation technologies help companies become compliant faster and more accurately. Instead of having large staff to manage compliance they can dedicate computer time to do the data-entry work on documents having compliance risk, and a small staff to maintain their presence. Similar to eDiscovery this preparedness mitigates potential risk and cost of not being ready.

Reduced Workers Comp Claims:
The lesser thought about value of document automation is workers compensation claims associated with document handling and entry. Companies with large data-entry staff can dramatically reduce claims associated with data-entry especially such as carpal tunnel, back pains, and eye strain. The staff's duties will shift to more body friendlily activities that are less redundant. Every year companies are spending a lot of money on workers compensation claims, and the administration of them. This reduces that cost and risk.

As you can see there are many areas where document automation can help companies, there are even a few more that are industry specific. Often companies find that the ROI is second to one of the above benefits of document automation.

Digital Ink – it's not OCR or ICR

Digital ink is the approach of having a touch screen device that monitors a users movements with a stylus on the screen to determine character was written. This is not OCR or more specifically ICR. Very often companies have asked for OCR technology when they meant digital ink and vice versa. OCR and digital ink overlap but not always. There are cases where you simply cannot do away with paper, and not to mention digital ink does not process typed text.

The first time the technology was seen was back when Apple released the Newton. The newton was the first PDA that had a touchscreen and stylus. Later Apple sold Newton to become Palm Computer. At that time you had to re-learn how to write characters according to a guide. The characters were specifically structure to provide the best recognition and then had to be completed in a single hand-stroke. When mastered the recognition was very good. Now any tablet PC has a basic version of digital ink software. Digital ink competes with ICR intelligent character recognition or hand-print. Whereas ICR technology is looking at an image of characters written, digital ink is monitoring hand strokes as the character is being written.

The accuracy difference between the two is an argument that can very easily be lost for both sides. There are times when digital ink is way more accurate and times when ICR of paper forms is more accurate. The key really is the business process that the technology is fitting into. Both have their place. Digital ink is usually combined with an elaborate data entry and content management process. Most often digital ink is not about getting a substantial amount of text from the operator but more about the operator answers quickly simple questions usually requiring no writing at all. The amount of characters entered in a digital ink scenario vs. a ICR of a form scenario is many times less. You will not see tablet PCs sent out in the mail to survey a customer base.

The biggest place digital ink is used today is in health-care where the drive is to increase it's adoption even more. The purpose of the technology in this space is to rapidly populate medical records at the point of examination. However health-care still remains to be one of the top paper generating industries requiring OCR and ICR. This shows the technologies both satisfy very different needs and should not be confused with each other.

How many keystrokes does it take to get to the center of accuracy?

Often times we are blinded by technology and forget the pain we originally adopted technology to solve. When I first learned accounting more tenured accountants would explain to me how they made journal entries on paper not Quick Books. Then I learned math I was freely solving complex equations on my graphic calculator as my professor explained how long these equations would take without it. OCR is no different. OCR is replacing manual data-entry that is not very accurate. If an OCR system is 85% or more accurate on a particular document type then it most likely is more accurate than a single entry by human on that same document type, and faster!

So we know there is a clear benefit to the technology; increased speed, increased accuracy, it's when companies want to be 100% accurate they start to groan. Before OCR and even today to reach 100% accuracy with data entry they did double or triple blind data entry. Double or triple the labor cost. What that means is that two separate people will data enter the same document and the results will be compared, make this three people and you will almost always be 100% accurate. You can do the same with OCR! Most large service bureaus in fact prefer that OCR technology make the first pass then they do one pass with manual entry making it double-blind. I'm going to suggest one step further.

Why not have OCR with settings geared towards numbers, and OCR with settings geared towards words ( our two separate data entry people ) both enter the same document and compare the results. Why not three sets of settings, maybe four? If you were to take the same OCR engine with different settings and compare their extraction results from each instance you are creating automated double blind data entry! You can replicate the trusted process for producing high accuracy with greater efficiency and lower cost.

I am a constant advocate of human intervention on low confident fields or characters, but in the above approach you are using more technology to replicate existing very accurate processes. Never forget the original problem and you will see very quickly that OCR is a benefit.