Learn What Is Intelligent Document and Data Capture and Get Started

The Paperless Office…Chasing the Impossible?

In a now famous (or infamous) 1975 issue of BusinessWeek titled “The Office of the Future” technologists describe “The Paperless Office.”

“Vincent E. Giuliano of Arthur D. Little, Inc., figures that the use of paper in business for records and correspondence should be declining by 1980, ‘and by 1990, most record-handling will be electronic.’”

I think we can all agree that we’re not there yet.

How about we agree that what we really want is “The Nearly Paperless

Office”?

The first part of any Document or Content Management System is capture.

What is Intelligent Document and Data Capture?

To keep it simple let’s stick with AIIM’s (Association for Information and Image Management) definition. AIIM is a nonprofit, serving information and image professionals.

“Document capture and data capture are not the same thing. Document capture is the conversion of a paper document into an electronic image of that document. Data capture extracts data from a business form”.

We’ll interpret “form” here as any paper or electronic source.

Why intelligent or automated?

Reduce Labor Speed Processing

and Information Delivery

Comply with Regulations

Reduce Errors

So what is the capture process?

So what is the capture process?

There are many models, from broad three-step processes to more specific five-step processes.

So what is the capture process?

There are many models, from broad three-step processes to more specific five-step processes.

Let’s go with the five-step.

1. CapturePaper Sources:

Electronic Sources:

Captured with scanners or MFP devices.

Network directories, emails, electronic forms, print streams,

faxes…anything made of 1’s and 0s.

2. Classify/Organize/Categorize

Identifying what the document or information is in order to correctly process and deliver the document and extract the information.

2. Classify/Organize/Categorize

Identifying what the document or information is in order to correctly process and deliver the document and extract the information.

Invoice ContractTax Form Patient Record ?

How should it be processed? Where should it be routed and stored?

3. Extract or MineCapturing data for the index or other

purposes.

May be data such as customer number, freight tracking number, invoice number, supplier name etc.Or, full-text indexing may be required where all text on the documents are captured. See What is Document Indexing.

4. ValidateUsing technology or manual inspection to ensure that a document is classified and

processed correctly

4. ValidateWith technology this may mean automatically validating against data sources or employing business rules. For instance if an inventory item should contain three alpha characters followed by five numbers, all documents not following that scheme may be tagged for manual inspection before further processing is done.

PEN21096CAP36581INV98453PA568793

5. Deliver or Integrate…to or with a search and retrieval or content

management system.

Obviously, without a system to locate documents or data, a system is useless.

Henry Schein, Dentrix, Dentrix EnterpriseDentrix Ascend, Easy DentalViive, DentalVision, axiUm

5. Deliver or IntegrateOften index information is sent to the document management system via an XML or CSV file where it can be made immediately available to the user. Systems such as SharePoint, Epic, Laserfiche and other ECM, EMR, EHR systems have various ways of accepting data feeds

FilenetLaserfiche

Documentum

MyMedicalRecords

Eaglesoft

AllscriptsEpic

DentrixCSV or XML

So how do we get that pig to fly?

Today we have proven and developing technologies propelling us to The

Nearly Paperless Office.

Barcode recognition (BCR) offers the most trustworthy recognition technology for data capture.

• Split Files• Classify Documents• Route Files• Index • Name Files • Bookmark PDFs

Use Barcodes to …

Learn more at What Can Barcodes Do For Me?

OCR is another mature data capture technology to...• Digitize text images so that they can be

electronically edited, searched, and stored• Make image-based files fully text-searchable or

extract data from a zone for indexing • Identify document areas for automatic OCR

capture (zonal OCR) • Drag-and-drop highlighted document text which is

automatically OCR'd and dropped into index fields (drag and drop OCR or rubber band OCR)

• Use extracted data to split, name, route, validate, etc.

Other Recognition Technologies For Data Capture

ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition)

• Handwriting recognition • Not as accurate as OCR, limited role in some capture systems

OMR (Optical Mark Recognition)

• Capturing human-marked data from document forms such as surveys and tests.• Like ICR, lower accuracy, limited application within data capture

Forms Recognition• Uses BCR, OCR, ICR and OMR in a structured data capture format• Typically templates are designed to instruct the capture software where to look for

information and how to process the information

Data or Text Mining (Often using Regular Expressions (regex))

A fast and powerful method to search, extract andreplace specific data found within scanned documents.

• Essentially a special text string for describing a search pattern.

• Extremely flexible and patterns can be constructed to match almost anything.

• Use data identified with regex to classify, split, name and route files.

Learn more at Using Regular Expressions for Automated Data Capture and Extraction.

Data or Text Mining (Often using Regular Expressions (regex))

…simply processing a large volume of documents, generally into a few files or one file and using intelligent capture software to process.

Some products process folders of documents on demand or “watch” folders for files to process.

Batch Document Processing

Learn more at What is Batch Document Processing?

Image Enhancement

• Adaptive thresholding• Deskew • Despeckle• Remove blank pages or

separator sheets• Auto rotate• Remove lines

To improve usability and increase accuracy of OCR and other recognition technologies, image enhancement is required.

Learn more at Improving OCR Accuracy with Cleanup and Enhancement.

Where is intelligent document and data

capture going?

Cloud Computing

Increased cloud computing will bring easily accessible resources and repositories for documents.

See Docs in the Clouds.

“The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend.” Gartner, Inc. Oct. 2013

Security FocusCouple the increasing number of documents being stored with the growing ways to access them, and security concerns will continue to increase.

Improved Data Mining and Classification

The increased used of data mining and better classification will increase OCR demands and lower the use of barcodes and separator pages.

Increased MobilityIncreased mobility demands in business impacts all information technology. Users want all information available from all platforms, no matter when or where.

Don’t be caught napping,JUST GET STARTED.

No one data capture product can “do it all”, but there is no better time to get started than now. ”The Nearly Paperless Office” can be yours.

Learn More about Document Imaging and Capture

For more on:• Watching folder,• Monitoring folder,• Watching folders,• Batch Processing,• Bulk scanning,• Split files with barcodes,• Barcode splitting,• How to batch process,• Batch process folders,• Docufi,• Imageramp,• Watch folders,• Data capture,• Scanning to folders,• Scanning to folder, • Scan to Folder, • Batch Splitting• Migration to document

management

Contact Us

DocuFi

30 years’ experience in the Document Imaging marketCapture Solutions www.docufi.com

Copyright ©2014

makers of ImageRamp, Document Management

Capture Solution

Image Credits• Christina Rutz, “When Pigs Fly”, http://bit.ly/1giOj05

• Nottsexminer , “Utopia”, http://bit.ly/1gnZTmS

• Kenny Louie, “One Way”, http://bit.ly/1iA7pxQ

• Spiffie, “Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M”, http://bit.ly/1ksdhhv

• Doctorwonder, “Stack O'Money!”, http://bit.ly/1fgxpko

• Maciej Lewandowski, “Pig on the wings”, http://bit.ly/N6lZCJ

• Sjsharktank, “Pigs fly, so now what?”, http://bit.ly/1g8UsYc

• Elvissa, “flyingpig”, http://bit.ly/1nLMzyB

• Jennicatpink, “Piglet Pile”, http://bit.ly/1cT6KUF

• Eddi, “phone”, http://bit.ly/1ftUezJ

• Martin Cathrae, “Cute Piggie“,http://bit.ly/1nLUDiT

• Sarah Beth Dwyer, “Jim's Pig”, http://bit.ly/Prl3dl