Document Storage Issues
It’s not unusual for businesses to acquire and store large quantities of printed material, especially for compliance and historical reasons. As anyone working with paper archives will testify, storage and access are ongoing problems and can take up entire rooms and many staff hours. Plus accessing this information can be painful and sometimes fruitless tasks, often taking hours to complete. This is before you concern yourself with the issues of security and fire risk – we all know paper burns well and cannot be repaired.
The problem of physical storage can be addressed through document scanning – converting the original paper-based file into a digital copy. Where entire rooms’ worth of paper can be reduced onto a single hard drive. Usually in the form of PDF or an image format such as JPEG.
Data Retreival
However, this doesn’t lend itself to easy access to the data and looking through a digital facsimile can be as time-consuming as looking through the original paper-based systems. Transcribing the whole text of a document or creating an indexing system will reduce this access time considerably but is very expensive in human time, and ultimately in financial cost as a result.
OCR Based AI Solutions
We can provide a software-based solution which can take in scanned documents in a number of formats and automatically extract the text from them, in both printed and handwritten formats.
Using Artificial Intelligence techniques that have been trained to recognise the written text we can (usually) create a textual representation of the document that can then be stored alongside the digital copy and be made searchable. Turning a task that used to take hours into one that now takes seconds.
Furthermore, documents can be cross-referenced with each other allowing multiple documents on the same subject matter to be retrieved en mass.
Should there be a need to enter the documents into an existing 3rd party piece of software, as long as this system has an API connection (a way programmers link multiple programs together) it can be automatically fed into a database or CRM system. Again, these are tasks our team has extensive knowledge of successfully completing.
Finally, where the documents are printed onto a standardised form, each form field can be isolated and stored separately and each piece of data put into its own database field. For example, the passport number can be separated from the person’s name and also from their address.
Contact Us To Find Out More
Contact us to discuss your individual storage and retrieval needs and let us advise on the best solution to automate and remove your document headaches.
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Feel free to call us on 01257 429217 or simply fill in the form here!