The second wave of document capturing has arrived.
Wave one of data capture started with manual sorting of documents and transcended to include methods such as barcoded separator insertion, and zonal OCR/OMR. This wave was moving rapidly to utilize image fingerprints, full text keywords and proximity learning. It all began in 1990 with back-office centralized batch and on-demand scanning. In this wave common capture devices used were document scanners, fax and email, and mobile scanning.
Wave one’s batch scanning technology relies on a person identifying the document types. We did this by placing separator sheets in between documents and then using rules embedded in the software to extract data. So, there is a huge manual process of needing a human to sort through and prepare the paper to route them correctly within the software.
Within this realm of electronic data capture technology, we had a limited classification ability until full text OCR, proximity and layout matching allowed us to remove the need for manual sorting and separator sheets. Starting in early 2014 there was the widespread use of technologies that took out the need for human sorting and separator sheets.
Data Capture Second Wave at a Glance:
- A change to a broad variety of capture devices
- Move to understanding documents in real-time
- Rather than a pre/post-process identification of doc types
- Accepting a wider range of document types (paper, or electronic)
- Mobile capture
The movement towards optimizing productivity in the workplace through implementation of service bureau vendors offering this data capture technology is growing as well with over 3 billion in annual software sales alone. So, take advantage of automating your workflow process with data capture technology to cut costs where you may have not seen possible before.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago based company with over 53 years of experience as a data processing service provider. We provide business with outsourcing solutions for document scanning services, data entry services and mailing/lettershop services. As an SOC2-approved organization, we apply industry-best practices to our approach with clients.