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How Can Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) Technology Help Your Business?
As technology continues to advance, ways of applying new technologies to the modern business world also advance. Companies increasingly rely on digital technology to automate workflow and streamline processes like accounts payable and purchasing.
Character recognition is one type of technology that’s vital to digitization and automation. When you’re automating invoice processing or digitizing document management, you need software that can recognize the characters (words, numbers, etc.) that are a part of those documents.
At first, image capture technology could record pictures of documents. Then, new advances in image indexing and character recognition took that to the next level by capturing the information on a document. Instead of just having a static image, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) generated a document that you could search and edit. OCR made digitizing paper documents and processing digital documents much easier. It wasn’t all that good at deciphering handwriting, though. That’s where Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) comes in.
What is Intelligent Character Recognition?
ICR is an advanced form of OCR. While OCR works best with documents generated by computers, ICR can recognize human handwriting. The accuracy still varies depending on how clear the handwriting is, but ICR offers much higher accuracy rates for handwriting and unusual fonts than OCR can. In many cases, an ICR system can also “learn” from new handwriting patterns and develop increased accuracy.
What does ICR mean for business processing?
Intelligent character recognition can make a huge difference in the accuracy rates for businesses that still have to work with paper documents. If your company’s going digital and you still need to work with paper documents that include handwriting (such as invoices, purchase orders, or goods received documents), then ICR technology will help digitize those files.
Implementing ICR helps reduce errors. That in turn speeds up processing times and dramatically reduces the amount of time spent checking for and correcting errors. This means a better experience for both your employees and customers. Employees don’t need to spend as much time on tedious tasks like double-checking scanned documents. In addition, you won’t be keeping customers waiting because of lengthy processing times.
How do you get ICR?
Different business process automation (BPA) software companies offer different features. Using a BPA system that includes ICR is a great way to incorporate intelligent character recognition into your business and update your business processing at the same time. Here at NextProcess, ICR is one of the things that we’ve started including in our software. We’re upgrading from OCR to deliver increased accuracy and make our software even more useful for your business.
If you’re already using NextProces software, we take care of this update for you. You don’t have to do anything special to get new features as we continually work to update our technology to provide you with the best features available in business automation software. If you’re a new customer, you can start using all the features that NextProcess offers very quickly. We’ll work closely with you to implement your new BPA software and customize it to the exact needs of your business. Contact us today to learn more, schedule a free demo, or get started with BPA software.
