Imagine yourself dealing with piles of data written on paper with an impending deadline hanging on you like the sword of Damocles. What if someone gives you a single button to get rid of that work ghost? That is what OCR technology mainly does for businesses, squeezing your time and efforts.
Just press a few buttons, and you are good to go!
Gone are the days when offices and organizations had to use extensive paper for data storage and manipulation.
Now you can grow your business with the new OCR technology and set yourself ahead of your competitors. Read this article to understand the nitty-gritty of the use of OCR.
What is OCR?
It is an innovative technology used by online image-to-text tools that extract text from your images and change them into editable form.
Importance of OCR in today’s world:
OCR has seized the day and played a key role in cutting down the red tape in offices and businesses.
Business automation is in vogue, thanks to OCR technology. The past decades have witnessed inexorable growth in the business industry, automated lending workflows, enhanced productivity, and customer satisfaction.
If you are lagging in any aspect of your business, you can use online OCR to reinvigorate your enterprise.
As of 2021 global market share of OCR technologyhas reached a simmering height of $21466.30 million with a compound annual growth of almost 14%?
There is an unending number of domains where people benefit from this technology. You can get an idea to figure out the best use for your own business.
OCR technology in the educational sector:
It would be needless to say; education is one of the necessities of life, just like food and water, since most countries vowed to provide free education to their youth, which is a good omen.
Yet, there exists some gap between the students and the resources. To bridge that gap, institutes are setting up e-libraries to provide any kind of books, catalogs, and research papers to anyone online or in pdf format.
Now the books which were rare to be seen find a place in your laptop or mobile phone. This all happened because of OCR.
Digitalizing books and other educational resources has made education free and easily accessible for everyone, regardless of nationality, caste, race, or religion.
OCR in legal courts:
Lawyers, judges, and other personnel have to deal with many papers in the shape of judgments, appeals, affidavits, statements, and wills.
Before OCR, there was an overwhelming red tape, seizing cases and bringing the whole legal system to a halt.
Yet now, the lawyers can get rid of retying a text by scanning it through an image-to-text tool. Moreover, it also reduces the time consumed to write down the text.
In addition, most legal scripts had errors that made them redundant. Now, officials can create error-free texts.
Another major problem that caused great anxiety to individuals was filing cases. People would wait for their turn to appeal in front of the court.
Yet OCR has made it an easy task to use the appeal to the court online with appearing in person to the court.
With the help of an image-to-text converter, searching, sorting, and editing becomes a hassle-free task.
OCR in the retail business:
You go to the mart either by local transport or your vehicle in a trivial retail setting. After reaching the mart, you roam around the mall to find the grocery items you want.
After that, you stand in a queue to pay the grocery bills. The whole activity kills much time that’s why people go top shopping mainly on Sundays.
However, OCR has taken away the tiring work and made shopping easy with your mobile phone. Do you know that mobile shopping has ended up getting a market share of $3.5 trillion in the market in 2021?
Image-to-text converter not only helps the customers but also helps the mart officials collect data of their customers and track down their shopping habits to market them the right products.
Uses of OCR technology to grow your business:
No matter what type of business you are running, OCR finds its importance in it. The main thing in any business is paper for data collection and storage.
OCR helps to reduce that usage and shift your business to the digital world. Thus, you can improve your business in the following ways:
Creating a database:
Why does every business need a database? Whether you have a retail business or transportation, you need to keep all the past bills, deals, invoices, sales, purchases, consumer records to get valuable data in need of an hour.
Having a paper record can be helpful, yet it cannot provide streamlined searching, editing, and accessing the required files.
You can easily convert your handwritten text into the database through the image-to-text converters empowered by OCR.
Moreover, storing paper files needs a separate room to keep records and separate employees to take care of the records.
Despite that, the text is prone to seasonal wear and tear, natural hazards, and accidents. On the other hand, any text can get stored in your digital database if you do not delete it.
Better productivity:
Handling many papers is a cumbersome act. It takes time and effort to script data on paper or shares it with individuals.
There is no room for mistakes in the clerical job where you have to manage data. Removing a single zero in sales ledger can bring your company to the cusp of loss.
That’s why paperwork decreases productivity because your employee needs extra time to manage things properly.
On the other hand, digital documents and spreadsheets are easy to handle, as you can edit and share them easily with a single click.
Less expensive:
We may have taken the paper for granted that we think it’s inexpensive. However, in reality, small to large organizations use the bulk of paper for various reasons.
Before the availability of a substitute, you had to use it willy-nilly. Yet, now OCR comes as a cheap option to reduce paperwork.
You may also find other ways to squeeze your working capital because OCR further reduces your employee demand. Thus, OCR is the best thing technology has ever produced for businesses.
Final Words:
It’s high time for you to shift your business to the digital realm. Once you have figured out the great uses of OCR technology for your company, you need to switch towards it.
If you lag in your businesses, it’s probably because of in-efficient processes. Thus, you need to automate your process to reduce human meddling and to get rid of paper once and for all.
Source@techsaa: Read more at: Technology Week Blog
