Automate form processing for all your forms and eliminate the hassles of manually processing, routing, and filing forms.
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Cut data entry time/costs by up to 90%
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Reduce error rates with validation rules
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Enable remote data entry
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Superior data entry ergonomics
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Improved data security & privacy
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Integrate paper, tablet & web forms data collection
Software-assisted data capture from forms
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The processing of forms is becoming an increasingly common business process. In the course of our lives, each of us has to fill out a variety of forms – credit card applications, questionnaires, insurance claims and many others. At the same time, information technology has become indispensable for collecting and managing this type of information, as it enables forms to be processed automatically. This is achieved via solutions for automatic, software-assisted extraction of data from paper forms.
To process a form, information from data fields, which have generally been filled out in handwriting by a customer, are converted to electronic form for further processing:
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Data that was entered is automatically read and “captured” from the relevant fields
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The forms themselves are digitised, stored as document images and archived in the system
Transform streams of forms and documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready data ....
Why Process Forms Digitally?
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In most cases form processing is considered to be completed as soon as the data from all of the forms has been captured, checked and saved in a database. To collect the data from paper forms, there are two approaches – resource-intensive manual data entry or the use of software for automated forms processing.
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Manual data entry is costly and laborious. It has a range of disadvantages for companies, such as the time delay in recording the data, many incorrect entries and increased labour costs for the manual handling of the data.
Software for the automatic entry and IT-assisted processing of forms can help to reduce these manual processing costs.
Types of Forms to Automate
Some common forms that can benefit from OCR/ICR/OMR automation include:
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Membership, credit & other applications
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Customer satisfaction surveys
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Warranty cards
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Health care forms
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Tax forms
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Research data collection surveys
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Multiple choice tests
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How Form Capture Software Works
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Digitisation
A batch of forms is digitised using a scanner or electronically produced forms (PDFs, webpage submissions) are collected by the form capture software.
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Automatic recognition
Form capture software automatically recognises the forms and reads the data in each field
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Verification
Data verification - Characters that the software does not recognise uniquely and automatically are forwarded to an operator for verification
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Rule Verification - Any business rules set up against data types (date formatting, postcode formatting, date ranges, mandatory fields, database look-ups, etc) are examined and check and any information failing those rules are forwarded to a operator for verification
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Export
Following successful verification, the data and/or images are exported and stored in one of the customer's back-end systems with different data being automatically routed to the correct location.
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Advantages of Automated Digital Capture
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Form capture software recognises writing produced by machine (OCR), handwritten entries (ICR), handles both letters and digits, can read checkboxes (OMR), and can extract barcodes from scanned or faxed paper forms.
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It also significantly reduces the time it takes to read data from forms and offers improved data extraction quality and the data transfer to third-party systems. Using a capture platform like FlexiCapture offers further advantages: once all application forms are scanned, they are forwarded to a standardised workflow process. All of the operators involved in this process check the information in the forms using standardised rule-based verification. The validated documents can then be automatically forwarded to a third-party system for further processing. This makes your data collection efficient and reliable.
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You can then dispense with manual tasks such as sorting or checking for missing pages, as the capture platform identifies the different form types and can select the relevant template for automatic processing.
