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What’s The Difference Between Image Capture and Image Indexing?
Have you ever been frustrated with your digital image capture? You’ve scanned a paper document into the system, opened it up, and then found out you can’t search for keywords or interact with the data. You thought digitizing your paper documents was supposed to make things easier!
The problem with many data capture technologies is they simply take a picture of the document. Some go a step better by incorporating a small amount of optical character recognition (OCR), which is designed to turn printed text into digital text files. That lets you search for certain keywords in the documents. But if you really want to turn your paper into a digital format that’s easy to work with, you need a system that can do data indexing.
How Paper Becomes Digital
We’re all pretty familiar with one of the more common data capture technologies: the scanner. Simple scanning software takes pictures of documents and stores them as digital files like PDFs. If you want the files named and tagged to make them easier to search, you have to enter that information manually.
As technology evolved, data capture technology became smarter. Now, more and more data capture systems include at least a small amount of OCR. This technology is designed to generate text documents rather than pictures of documents. If all goes well, the documents end up being editable and searchable.
The Benefits of OCR
More and more companies that are switching from a manual, paper-based process to digital and automatic business processing are using OCR to capture usable documents. OCR systems use pattern recognition to look at a printed image and generate a digital equivalent.
This is a huge improvement over simple image capture. Processing documents with OCR lets you search and edit the files. Plus the documents take up less digital storage space since text files are smaller than image files.
Revolutionary Data Indexing
If you’re searching for business process automation software, at the bare minimum you’ll want a system that supports OCR. Ideally, though, you’ll want a system that does document indexing as well. This sort of system creates a searchable index for virtually every aspect of the document. That includes all the information in the document (text, barcodes, etc.) as well as metadata with respect to the document submission (date received, user who submitted, etc.).
Data indexing technology lets you take data capture to the next level. You’ll really have a business processing system that makes your work simpler and enables truly useful document management. Not only can you search for the information contained in each document, but you can also now search for information about the document and how it has been processed.
NextProcess software supports document indexing. Our system gives you full-text search functionality so you can quickly find the right documents. Plus, we enable metadata analysis and reporting at the touch of a button. Contact us to learn more or set up a demo so you can see what a big difference data indexing can make for your company.
