Scanning documents used to only be for archiving. Today the advances in capture software have enabled businesses to extract key pieces of information from within the document in a highly automated fashion. Today the various Capture Software solutions rely on several techniques to locate, validate and accurately extract information from your documents. Here are some of the ways in which this can be accomplished (hover over term to view description):
Zonal
OCR
Database Lookup
(Match & Merge)
Smart
Zones
This method uses tools such as regular expressions and Anchor Attach Points to locate information anywhere it may reside within the documents. This method is great for semi structured and unstructured documents.
Regular
Expressions
These are sequences of characters that define a search pattern. This method can be used to find values such as, but not limited to, Social Security Numbers where the data pattern may be 9 numeric digits or 11 characters defined as XXX-XX-XXXX.
Point & Click
OCR
Barcode
Recognition
Optical Mark
Recognition (OMR)
This feature enables the software to read check boxes or radio buttons to see if they have been marked. Each check box or button has a value associated with it and the software will assign that value of the region that is checked or filled in to the field it is associated with.
While these methods and features are powerful on their own, the real value is in utilizing these methods together along with other features to create business rules to extract and validate information from the documents. Once this information has been captured and extracted, it can be used to populate databases, initiate a workflow, or simply structure the output in a consistent and usable format.