In the course of our lives we fill out hundreds of forms, including — application forms, questionnaires, insurance claims, etc. At the same time computers have become indispensable for collecting and managing information, making the task of extracting data from printed documents even more pressing.
Forms processing is a procedure whereby information entered into data fields is captures into electronic form:
- Entered data are “captured” from their respective fields;
- The forms themselves are digitized and saved as images.
In most cases forms processing is considered complete when the data from all the forms have been captured, verified and saved into a database. There are only two approaches to data collection from paper forms: - to involve many people in manually keying in data;
- to start using automated forms processing software.
Manual data entry is boring and troublesome. It implies many problems, such as delays in data capture, a great number of operator typos, high labor costs, equipment expenditures, rental charges, etc. All of these costs are avoidable with the help of a data capture and forms processing software.
How Data Capture works
- A batch of completed forms is scanned using a high-speed scanner (Usually scanners that scan at least 10 pages per minute are used);
- Most of the data are recognized automatically;
- Characters about which the program is uncertain are passed on to a human operator;
- Verified data are saved into a database.
Forms Processing Scheme
Data Capture interprets machine-print (OCR), isolated hand print (ICR), including alpha and numeric, mark sense (OMR) and barcodes from paper forms gathered from a scanner or a fax machine.
Data Capture interprets machine-print (OCR), isolated hand print (ICR), including alpha and numeric, mark sense (OMR) and barcodes from paper forms gathered from a scanner or a fax machine.
Data Capture interprets data from paper forms many times faster and much more accurately than any professional operator, enabling you to collect data in an efficient and secure way. It is noteworthy that the entire process requires only one human operator, since all of the stages, except verification, are fully automated. Neither manual sorting nor checking for missing pages is required, since Data Capture can identify forms and select the matching template.
Data Capture is a highly scalable system that can be set up in either Standalone or Distributed configuration processing up to 1 000 000 forms per day * and satisfy any business requirements.
Finally, the extracted data looks exactly like the data you get from your current manual system, but you get it faster, and the captured content is more accurate and reliably correct, which is undoubtedly critical to your business. The department involved in data input is now well controlled, perfectly compact, and scalable to be able to process forms in bulk in any quality.
