Data is Everything. It does not matter in what field your company works, after all everything will be distilled into digits of data and accumulated in Database to be processed, stored, repurposed and reassembled again, again and again. All organizations have database, that acts as a repository for all of their information. And you may survive with manual data entry, or using spreadsheets or just folders with documents for some time, but eventually just mare amount of Data will become overwhelming.
Luckily there are plenty of solutions for your Database. You can choose between SQL (MySQL, Access, Postgres, …) or NoSQL (Mongo, AWS, …) solutions for storing and processing Data, but there will be always an issue of how raw unprocessed digits get from images or texts into more structured form of your Database. Identifying and transferring all of this data can be a bit of a task. Misreading data or mismatching of data to fields could easily ruin your data processing system. Thus, precision of data character recognition becomes essential.
One of the solutions is to keep these processes of scanning and data transferring separate. You can use one software for character recognition and transferring data from image to PDF or text document. And then to use PDF (or text) to database converters to extract that data into your database format. The very obvious disadvantage of this approach is that it adds the whole extra step into your data processing. You will start accumulate additional errors, will add time for setting up additional conversion, will add time to data processing and will add time for inevitable error identifying and bug fixing. It may work for smaller companies, but on larger enterprise level it becomes cost prohibitive.
Another solution is OCR to Database direct approach. Using OCR to database, scanned images can be transferred directly to a database where they are converted into searchable documents and then stored and processed. Ultimately when such software is used employees do not have to spend hours locating files in the database and therefore their time and energy can be saved, leading to cost savings.
Fortunately many OCR packages offer you an option to automate this process, or at least to do everything while staying inside of the one OCR ecosystem. Most of the Enterprise level OCR solutions (like SimpleIndex, Abbyy FineReader Server, Abbyy FlexiCapture, or IRIS Document Server) have this function implemented in it on larger, highly customizable levels. That would allow you to automate your data flow directly from paper document to database files.
Unfortunately, documents that you need to process do not always come in a shape of table. Most of the time you will deal with documents that will have a lot of text and data that does not need to be processed with important data hidden here in there. And yes, with the Zone OCR solutions you can assemble bubbles of desired text and data into the spreadsheet or database file results.
Please contact us if you want to learn more about OCR to Database options. We will be happy to share our experience in character recognition and process automation.
Here are your main options:
SimpleIndex Scan To Database is designed to streamline the single-user scanning workflow employed by most desktop scanners. SimpleIndex lets you define the entire scanning process from beginning to end, then execute the steps in that workflow automatically. This minimizes user training and interruptions for input during the scanning process.
Open database integration is a powerful feature of SimpleIndex and one that furthers its interoperability with custom programs. Instead of using a proprietary database, SimpleIndex allows you to map its index fields to cells in any database table. It can be configured to create new records, update existing ones or retrieve them for viewing. Using these three basic database functions, SimpleIndex is able to interface with and operate on any database.
SimpleIndex offers export to XML files, as well as the SimpleExport module. It makes it possible to integrate with any third party database, application, or document management systems (DMS) that accepts an XML or text file import.
Simplendex features “Match and Attach” mode, which combines the power of the Autofill feature with the ability to update existing records in your database. This lets you “attach” images to existing database records by “matching” them with values from SimpleIndex.
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ABBYY FlexiCapture is a powerful data capture and document processing solution. FlexiCapture allows you convert scanned paper documents, images and PDFs to Database formats. We would recommend it as the best choice of OCR software for enterprise scale business.
Innovative server-based OCR software for performing centralized enterprise-wide OCR processing. Processor license allows anyone on the network to submit files for OCR. Complex XML job specifications can be submitted to control output, making it a very powerful Enterprise level OCR to Database solution. Support available for Arabic and Asian languages.
IRISDocument Server is an automatic, server-based OCR solution that can automatically convert huge volume of images into fully searchable, structured and hyper-compressed documents like Databases. It is a lower cost solution compared to Abbyy FineReader Server, but lacks some of the more advanced features and has slightly lower accuracy.
