Demystifying Document Digitization Solutions for Industries

Why digitize documents and files?

Operational cost reduction is one of the most common and critical areas any business aims to achieve. Today, paper-based processes lead to manual, costly, and ineffective resource utilization. Whether it's banking, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, or insurance, solving time-consuming paper-based business processes is of paramount importance. Furthermore, enterprises are adopting document digitization to move from paper-based to paperless business processes.

Can adoption of existing document data digitization solutions and services be a reliable solution to paper-based processes? Well, the underlying technology in existing document data digitization solutions is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A report projects the OCR market to hit $26.31 billion by 2028, with a CAGR of 16.7%.

The big three technology firms introduced the Cloud OCR services. These services assisted businesses in creating automated business processes, search indexes, and compliance maintenance solutions. These services claim to take a document such as PDF or image as an input to generate digital output with entity pairs, tables, and raw text.

Is this to suggest that businesses can implement one of these document digitization services and start saving money? Here’s an observation on existing data digitization solutions and services!

To get the answers, we looked at documents from different clients. These were mainly from the banking, healthcare, manufacturing, and life science industries. We used all three OCR document digitization services to extract data from real documents. Here are our observations.

Challenges in Existing Document Digitization Services

Post Processing Efforts: We used the Cloud OCR services to understand document processing. During the demonstration, we used real documents from banking, healthcare, life science, and manufacturing instead of manually creating dummy documents. The results of document digitization processes were not as accurate as those of the demo documents. For instance, the individual elements were not accurately captured by the OCR services. We observed a major gap in the outcomes as compared to demo documents. However, the collection of raw data is better.

During the demo, we felt the need for post-processing efforts required to build logic on top of raw extracted data from different types of documents. Building logic on top of the raw data is like making a list of 50 things and deciding which five are most important to your business. Instead of extracting a vast amount of data, it would be extremely useful to identify and collect only the individuals of interest.

Accurate Structural Extraction: Industries are looking for extracting data from Nested tables, radio keys, and checkboxes. The results of structural extractions of this sort are not encouraging. This is the most important question that Cloud OCR services must resolve. This will make life simpler for the manufacturing, healthcare, and life science industries.

Entity Extraction from Unstructured Documents: Legal Contracts, Autopsy Reports, and other unstructured records are popular in banking and healthcare. Today healthcare and legal professionals read these complex documents and papers, extract information, and register with the mainstream system.

Industries are looking for document digitization services that can collect data regardless of structure or similarity. Cloud OCR services must develop a standardized solution for extracting entities regardless of their configuration or similarity. This will immensely enable them to work on mission-critical responsibilities.

What are Industry Expectations From OCR-Based Document Digitization Solutions?

This is what we fathom based on the interactions with our customers and the current demand in the opportunistic OCR market. Here is what the industry demands from OCR-based document digitization solutions and services.

• Fast and accurate pre/post-processing activities with minimal dependency on technology while document digitization.
• Precise extractions of documents with a tolerance of not more than 10% correction in document digitization.
• Quick entity mapping of extracted entities to achieve seamless integration with business systems. These include Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, and Content Management Systems.
• Intuitive and intelligent verification/review interface during data digitization.
• Effective operational dashboards to track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to extraction precision, length, and time in data digitization.
• Robust, personalized, and scalable enterprise workflow to process a million documents with ease.

What is Xoriant SmartCapture?

Xoriant is working closely with enterprises to transform operations and take advantage of best-of-the-breed OCR and ML technologies. We are working to solve business problems including paper-based processes and fill in gaps to achieve maximum operational efficiency. Built on the Microsoft Azure OCR, Xoriant SmartCapture is a proprietary document digitization solution used to intuitively help digitize paper-based business processes.

SmartCapture has been trained on millions of real customer documents. These include documents from a variety of industries, including banking, healthcare, life science, and many others. The solution has been stress-tested on ordinary hardware for digitizing 100K pages in a day and is scalable to handle millions of pages and more.

With just 5 minutes of non-technical configuration efforts, we can achieve high accuracy output. The operational dashboard and personalized workflow configuration make Xoriant SmartCapture an easy-to-adapt solution. Similarly, we are fulfilling industry needs and enhancing our document digitization solution SmartCapture to meet industry expectations.

Salient Features of Xoriant SmartCapture Solution

Benefits of Xoriant SmartCapture

The following are the benefits of digitizing documents using the Xoriant SmartCapture solution in your business environment:

• Increase operational efficiency
• Boost workforce productivity
• Reduce total cost of ownership
• Enable quick decision making with actionable data

Xoriant SmartCapture Success Story for a Diagnostics Firm

Our client is a leading global company manufacturing a wide array of innovative medical diagnostic assays. The company had about 50,000 Batch Record documents in scanned format from 8 product families. Each product family had 2 types of documents i.e., PBR (Production Batch Record) and FLR (Filling and Labelling Record). The client wanted a solution to digitize and index this information to equip scientists with real-time access to critical data records for quick statistical analysis.

Xoriant used its very own state-of-the-art intuitive document digitization solution SmartCapture developed using MS Azure OCR. Certainly, the solution made reports searchable for clinical scientists with limited IT knowledge. We performed data classification, data extraction, and the necessary quality checks to convert the manual records into accurate digital records.

The benefit? Firstly, using the Xoriant SmartCapture, we achieved 99.5% accuracy levels in digitized documents with data quality improvement efforts. Secondly, we minimized the information search time from hours to seconds and improved investigation efficiency with a centralized data storage and retrieval system. Thirdly, we reduced the time needed for data mining with digital transformation and allowed more time (scientists) to work on investigations.

Read Success Story

 

What is the Way Forward for OCR-Based solutions?

In conclusion, based on our knowledge and experience dealing with dozens of real-world OCR problems, we are convinced that there is a need for innovation, standardization, and flexible functions to build mature solutions in this space. Certainly, the ability to achieve scalability, accuracy, and responding to market disruptions will give a leading edge to be winners of the OCR-based document digitization race.    

Are you facing any challenges in your current business processes? Exploring the best document digitization solution? To schedule a demo of our data digitization solution Xoriant SmartCapture or for further details on OCR solutions for businesses, write to us at SmartCapture@Xoriant.com