July 22, 2013
Yes. Really!
You’ve probably heard about “the Magic of Compounding” … the mantra that every good financial counsellor will continuously repeat to his or her clients. In the world of document management, relating to the retention, recall and eventual retirement of paper-based information, there is a magic bullet of sorts: OCR – Optical Character Recognition.
In its most simplistic sense, OCR will enable you to find a word or number existing anywhere in a document that has been digitized and appropriately indexed. Indexing refers to the electronic attachment of a unique identifier – e.g. name, date, number – to a digitized document. The document is then put through the OCR process which will enable future instant access (usually in less than a minute) to the exact information you are looking for. Compare this to the hours or days that can be spent searching for a piece of needed information, apply an hourly rate to the time spent, and you begin to get an idea of the immense costs that are currently being paid out to employees just for the locating and retrieving of information!
There is a wide spectrum of ways in which information can be retrieved and used by coupling the OCR resource with various types of document management software and systems; and the positive productivity and profit results of these improvements can be literally spectacular in almost any kind of business, non-profit, public sector or government operation.
What is especially appealing, is that today’s document management systems and software no longer push you into financial nose-bleed territory! Our research in this field since 2009 has turned up a credible range of excellent low-priced (almost “cheap”!) EDM Systems that can now bring excellent information management benefits at very affordable prices, and often with amazingly quick return on investment.
The Magic of OCR? Oh yes! It’s quite real!
