Total Cost of Ownership of an OCR Software

What is TCO (total cost of ownership)?

Total Cost of Ownership

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting. (Wikipedia).

TCO is a popular concept when it comes to comparing Software. It allows you to estimate the cost of using the OCR software and plan your automation strategy according to your possible workload and budget over time.

There are several aspects that are too circumstantial to be able to include in general cost estimates, but there are some that we know for a fact, and we can combine them in a total cost of ownership for each OCR scenario and compare them to the possible solutions on the market.

Front-End Cost

The first and most obvious element is front-end cost. This is the price that will be presented with the product, and the marketing team will be pointing towards special offers and discounts to cut it down. It is an important factor, but it is far from everything you would need to take into account. And yet, even here, there are different options. Some of the OCR solutions will offer you the “pay and forget” option of making one payment right here, right now. However, lately, the annual cost or subscription model has become more and more popular, allowing customers to spread costs over time and OCR creators to organize a steady flow of income.

Cost of Support and Maintenance

The second element of the total cost of ownership would be the cost of support and maintenance. Theoretically, it is possible to avoid […]

OCR Guide

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret text on scanned images. When this technology is applied to automating business data entry processes it’s referred to as OCR Data Capture.

Many are familiar with popular desktop OCR applications designed to convert scanned images to editable documents. When this process is applied to specific areas of the document containing data fields it’s called zone OCR. But OCR data capture software is more than just simple zone OCR. Modern applications use some or all of these technologies:

Handprint recognition (ICR or Intelligent Character Recognition) for forms processing.
Advanced rules-based templates for locating common data elements on pages with different layouts and formatting.
Artificial intelligence that is able to use point and click user feedback to train recognition templates automatically.
Natural language processing is able to interpret paragraphs of text and extract meaningful data from them.
Robotic process automation puts back office integration into the hands of power users instead of programmers.
Preconfigured form templates and business rules for common applications like invoice processing and healthcare claim forms.

80%

Using the OCR software enables enterprises to reduce the document processing time by as much as 80%

Benefits of using OCR

If not for the trees then do it for the savings on paper, toner, copiers and their services contracts, etc.

How much time is wasted searching for paper files? Digital documents can searched and viewed instantly from anywhere.

Paper is much harder to backup and restore than digital data.

Office square footage and off-site records storage adds to the cost of keeping paper documents.

Government mandates for records retention […]

API Services in FineReader Server

The Open API is a component of FineReader Server. It can be installed onto any computer in the network.

FineReader Server provides two types of Open API for integration with external systems:

COM-based API
Web Services API

The Web services API enables communication with remote systems via HTTP and therefore allows for remote integration over the Internet. In case of the Web services API, you do not need to install any components on the client computer.

The FineReader Server 14 Web Services API includes a SOAP API and a REST API.

For detailed information please visit API Overview

The Web Services API provides two services:

WebService (http://<ServerName>/FineReaderServer14/WebService.asmx)
ServerManager service (http://<ServerName>/FineReaderServer14/ServerManager.asmx)

For detailed information please visit Using WebAPI

Note. In Recognition Server 4.0 the service is available via the following address: http://<ServerName>/Recognition4WS/RSSoapService.asmx

For more information on using the API in Recognition Server, see the built-in help by the path:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\ABBYY Recognition Server 4\Help\Open API Help

Working with REST API

Watch this video and see how to use FineReader Server Web Services API in a few simple steps.

FineReader Server can be used by using REST API. To configure this workflow:

Connect to the FineReader Server.
Select a workflow: The FineReader Server 14 Web Services API uses a FineReader Server workflow to process image files. See the list of available worflows by using API/workflows endpoint or call the GetWorkflows SOAP method.
Upload a file: Use the API/workflows/{workflowName}/input/file endpoint or call the StartProcessFile SOAP method.
Check the processing state: Use the API/jobs/{jobId} endpoint or call the GetJobStateInfo SOAP method.
Download the result: Use the API/jobs/{jobId}/result endpoint or call the GetJobResultEx SOAP method.

API reference

The API of ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK uses HTTP POST and HTTP GET methods for sending data to an HTTP server. The parameters of requests are specified in the URL string. The URL depends on the processing location of your application. See Data processing location for […]

Catherine2022-06-21T14:46:56-04:00Tags: Batch OCR Software, OCR Engine, OCR Library, OCR SDK, SDK OCR, Server OCR|

Amazon Textract API

Automatically extract handwriting, plain text or form data from any document using the world’s largest OCR machine learning model based on billions of sample documents.

Amazon Textract is a cloud OCR service that automatically detects and extracts text and data from scanned documents and PDF files. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Amazon Textract API also lets you implement OCR in your RPA workflows. UiPath and other bots offer connectors that let you include Textract OCR into your RPA process.

Textract is not a “ready-to-use” product. It requires programing skills, experience with AWS systems and decent amount of coding to implement it into your systems, especially once you add user interfaces for scanning and data validation.

Simple Software developers have the necessary skills and experience to integrate Textract into your custom applications. Contact us or click the Request a Quote button to get a proposal for your custom application development project.

Simple Software also offers the ready-to-use SimpleIndex application that incorporates Textract into a fully-featured scanning, indexing and document processing application.

You can learn more about Amazon Textract into SimpleIndex here.

Google Cloud Vision API

Vision API offers powerful pre-trained machine learning models through REST and RPC APIs. Assign labels to images and quickly classify them into millions of predefined categories. Detect objects and faces, read printed and handwritten text, and build valuable metadata into your image catalog.

Automatically extract handwriting, plain text or form data from any document using a huge machine learning model based on billions of sample documents.

Google Vision is a cloud OCR service that automatically detects and extracts text and data from scanned documents and PDF files. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Google Vision API also lets you implement OCR in your RPA workflows. UiPath and other bots offer connectors that let you include Vision OCR into your RPA process.

Google Vision is not a “ready-to-use” product. It requires programing skills, experience with Google cloud services, and decent amount of coding to implement it into your systems, especially once you add user interfaces for scanning and data validation.

Simple Software developers have the necessary skills and experience to integrate Google Vision into your custom applications. Contact us or click the Request a Quote button to get a proposal for your custom application development project.

Nikita2024-02-16T17:10:56-05:00Categories: Cloud OCR, Handwriting Recognition, Invoice Processing, OCR SDK, Server OCR|Tags: AI OCR Training, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud OCR, Convert Handprint to Text, Cursive Handwriting Recognition, Data Capture, Handprint Recognition, Handwriting Recognition, Machine Learning, OCR Accuracy, OCR Engine, OCR Library, OCR SDK, Read Handwriting, SDK OCR|

Atalasoft DotImage OCR SDK

Atalasoft provides OCR SDKs that can be integrated into your desktop or web applications for manual or automated batch processing of images. These are an industry proven document transformation engines and add-ons to the DotImage SDK and can save countless hours and significantly improve accuracy. One of the main advantages is that it is mostly royalty free SDK with many different options and engines to choose from. Allowing you to create your own OCR components of your software with just one payment in front.

Atalasoft OCR SDK has plenty of plugins to add more features like:

OmniPage OCR & ICR
Tesseract OCR
GlyphReader OCR
BarcodeReader 1D and 2D
Barcode Writer
DotTwain

Nikita2024-03-12T17:08:51-04:00Categories: OCR SDK, Tungsten Automation Kofax|Tags: OCR Library, OCR SDK, SDK OCR|

UiPath RPA OCR Solutions

OCR data capture automation workflow development using UiPath RPA.

While we specialize in OCR data capture solutions, our certified UiPath integrators can help you with any aspect of your robotic process automation initiative. From planning to rollout to user training and bot development, our RPA specialists will ensure best practices are implemented and ROI is realized.

Contact us to get a quote or an online demo of our UiPath OCR solutions.

ABBYY FlexiCapture SDK On-Premise

ABBYY FlexiCapture SDK enables software developers to quickly create applications that extract meaning from documents. FlexiCapture SDK is ideal for system integrators, developers, and service providers who want to integrate powerful data capture capabilities into their solutions. Through the use of ABBYY’s machine learning and AI, end customers are able to process more transactions, faster, and with fewer errors, improving customer service, reducing costs, and making smarter process decisions.

FlexiCapture SDK, as a delivery option of the FlexiCapture platform, provides developers with a powerful and flexible toolkit to smoothly integrate ABBYY’s industry-leading data capture technologies to empower their own products and services according to vertical market needs.

Licensing is based on number of developers for the base SDK, then annual page counts for the perpetual license. All of the functionality supported by ABBYY FlexiCapture is included in the license, with a few exceptions.

ABBYY FineReader Engine on-premise OCR SDK

The software development kit ABBYY FineReader Engine allows software developers to create applications that extract textual information from paper documents, images or displays. This AI-powered OCR SDK provides your application with excellent text recognition, PDF conversion, and data capture functionalities, enabling it to convert scans into searchable PDF, Word or Excel documents, and access data on photos or screenshots.

Licensing is based on number of developers for the base SDK, then annual page counts for the perpetual license. Each of the optional components increases the per-page cost slightly.

aaron2022-06-22T16:48:43-04:00Categories: ABBYY, Arabic/Hebrew Scripts, Asian CJK OCR, Farsi/Persian/Iranian, Handwriting Recognition, OCR SDK|Tags: Barcode OCR, Handprint Recognition, ICR, OCR Character Recognition, OCR Engine, OCR Library, OCR PDF, OCR SDK, Server OCR|

ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK

ABBYY® Cloud OCR SDK is a web-based document processing service that will enhance your enterprise software systems, SaaS platforms, or your mobile apps with the ability to convert documents and utilize textual information from scans, PDFs, document images, smartphone photos, or screenshots.

Combining ABBYY’s latest AI-based technologies for information extraction with the highly scalable processing power of the Microsoft® Azure® computing infrastructure, this secure and reliable ABBYY cloud service can be easily integrated into your application via a REST API—empowering it to precisely convert virtually any number of pages within the shortest amount of time.

Robotic Process Automation

Introducing Robotic Process Automation

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation and it represents a new approach to business automation that helps minimize the technical hurdles required for implementing new workflows.

Traditional business process automations rely on application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow systems to exchange data. This approach has two main drawbacks:

The application vendor must make those APIs available
A programmer needs to write custom code to interface with them

If your software vendor does not provide an interface for consuming the data you need to automate, then you’re out of luck. And even if they do, the development costs can eliminate the ROI if the transaction volume isn’t large enough.

RPA tools avoid the API problem by interfacing directly with the application user interface just like a human would do. They use artificial intelligence and machine learning to “watch” the operator perform a task within the application then creates its own program (called a “bot”) to mimic it. This means that:

Bots can do anything a human can do within the application
Users can create a bot without writing code

Practically speaking, an experienced robotic process automation consultant with programming experience is required to roll out an RPA solution enterprise-wide, and most users will only be able to automate small, routine tasks without assistance. Business-critical, high-volume automations will still involve coding. But RPA dramatically reduces the implementation time and avoids the need to retrofit APIs for software applications that were not designed to support them.

Using RPA with OCR Data Capture

OCR Data Capture is one of the most common business processes to automate with RPA. Taking data stored in paper or electronic documents and […]

OCR to Database

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. […]

Simple Software

SimpleIndex can bring speed and efficiency to your scanning or doc filing no matter the process. Even if all you are doing is hand keying a few basic details about a document, breaking those details into individual indexes and adding tools like drop down choice lists, automatic orientation, and blank page deletion ensure a smoother, more consistent process.

Automation

Here’s where things start to get interesting. From basic tasks like splitting individual documents within at stack of pages by spotting a blank page, a specific mark, or a barcode separator to capturing index data directly from the page or looking up additional details about a document in a database, SimpleIndex has a host of powerful tools to tame your piles of paper or drives full of digital files. Let’s look at a few.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition is the ability to take a scan, which is merely a picture of a page, and turn it into words that the computer can understand and use to index your files. SimpleIndex leverages the power of ABBYY FineReader, recognized as one of the best OCR engines on the market, to accurately capture names, dates, important numbers, document types, and other details about your file. Some products have you set a box and capture whatever information happens to fall in that zone. SimpleIndex takes it further with Dynamic Zone OCR to enable you to set an oversized zone that allows for shifting of the pages between scans, but still captures just the date you need by matching against templates, lists, or even Regular Expressions (RegEx). You can also skip the zones entirely and use the full text of a page to find matches for your index data.

Barcodes

Nikita2023-01-10T20:04:41-05:00Tags: Accounts Payable Automation, AI Classification, AP Invoice Scanning, Automatic Classification, Automatic Document Separation, Barcode OCR, Batch OCR, Batch OCR PDF, Batch OCR Software, Cloud OCR, Convert Images to Searchable PDF, Convert PDF to Excel, Document Classification, Document Management, Document Processing Software, Excel OCR, Forms Processing, Invoice Automation Software, Invoice Capture, Invoice Imaging, Invoice OCR, Invoice Recognition, Invoice Scanning Software, Invoice Workflow Software, OCR Engine, OCR Form, OCR Form Software, OCR Invoice Processing, OCR Library, OCR PDF, OCR Scanner, OCR SDK, OCR to Excel, OMR, Optical Mark Recognition, PDF Converters, PDF Data Extraction, PDF OCR, PDF Text Extraction, PDF to TXT Converter, Receipt Scanning, Scan Handwriting to Text, Scan Invoice, Scan to Excel, SDK OCR, Server OCR, Simple Invoice Software, Tax Forms OCR, Zonal OCR, Zone OCR|

SimpleOCR | OCR Software Experts

Learn More Download Now

Document Scanners
& Scanner Parts

Accurate OCR starts with quality images. Efficient OCR starts with fast scanning. Find Document Scanners built for OCR at ScanStore.

Our Team of OCR experts is here to help! SimpleOCR is not just Freeware, we have every kind of OCR solution from PDF Converters to Enterprise Data Capture, OCR Servers and Handprint Recognition for Forms and Surveys. Live chat with an OCR specialist now or Contact Us for a consultation on your OCR project.

SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR Software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications.

SimpleIndex is OCR built for business, offering powerful batch scanning, OCR server, and data capture features with a simple user interface and affordable licensing.

If you like free stuff, freeware versions of our SimpleView Document Viewer (with Tesseract OCR), SimpleCoversheet Bar Code Printer, and SimpleExport CSV to XML Converter are also available.

If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it. The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way. Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free–home users, educational institutions, even corporate users.

If your documents have multi-column layouts, non-standard fonts, tables, poor quality or digital camera images, you will not have much success with applications based on free and open source engines like SimpleOCR and Tesseract. You will need a commercial OCR application to get an accurate read. Our OCR Guide compares desktop and server […]

aaron2024-01-04T22:37:28-05:00Tags: Accounts Payable Automation, Accounts Payable OCR, AI Classification, AI OCR Training, AP Invoice Scanning, Artificial Intelligence, Automate Data Entry, Automated Invoice Processing Software, Automatic Classification, Automatic Document Separation, Barcode OCR, Batch OCR, Batch OCR PDF, Batch OCR Software, Best OCR Software, Best OCR Software for Handwriting, Best Optical Character Recognition Software, Best Software to Create Forms, Check Mark Recognition, Compare OCR Software, Convert Handprint to Text, Convert Images to Searchable PDF, Convert PDF to Excel, Data Capture, Data Extraction, Electronic Data Capture, Excel OCR, Forms Processing, Handprint Recognition, Handwriting Recognition, Healthcare OCR, ICR, Invoice Automation Software, Invoice Capture, Invoice Imaging, Invoice OCR, Invoice Recognition, Invoice Scanning Software, Invoice Workflow Software, Knoxville Robotic Process Automation, Knoxville RPA Consultants, Knoxville UiPath Consultants, MAC OCR Software, Machine Learning, NLP, OCR Engine, OCR Form, OCR Form Software, OCR Invoice Processing, OCR Library, OCR PDF, OCR Scanner, OCR SDK, OCR Solution, OCR to Excel, OMR, Optical Mark Recognition, PDF Converters, PDF Data Extraction, PDF OCR, PDF Text Extraction, PDF to TXT Converter, Read Handwriting, Receipt Scanning, Robotic Process Automation, RPA, Scan Handwriting to Text, Scan Invoice, Scan to Excel, SDK OCR, Simple Invoice Software, Tax Forms OCR|

OCR SDK

The SimpleOCR SDK is a fast, lightweight OCR engine designed to let developers add basic OCR functions to an application with minimal cost and none of the drawbacks of open source solutions.

The ABBYY FineReader SDK is a fully-featured OCR engine with advanced features like handprint recognition, barcode recognition, ID and business card recognition, and support for 200+ languages including Asian scripts, Arabic and Hebrew. FineReader SDK is available in both Cloud and On-Premise versions.

The ABBYY FlexiCapture SDK gives you advanced, AI-based OCR data capture capabilities like document classification, forms processing, invoice processing, and machine learning for training data extraction templates.

You can shop for all of these in our OCR store, and our expert staff will be here to advise and assist in your OCR development project. Contact us to see how we can help!

Atalasoft provides OCR SDKs that can be integrated into your desktop or web applications for manual or automated batch processing of images. These are an industry proven document transformation engines and add-ons to the DotImage SDK and can save countless hours and significantly improve accuracy. One of the main advantages is that it is mostly royalty free SDK with many different options and engines to choose from. Allowing you to create your own OCR components of your software with just one payment in front. Atalasoft OCR SDK has plenty of plugins to add more features like:

OmniPage OCR & ICR
Tesseract OCR
GlyphReader OCR
BarcodeReader 1D and 2D
Barcode Writer
DotTwain

Google Cloud Vision API offers powerful pre-trained machine learning models through REST and RPC APIs. Assign […]

aaron2022-06-21T12:11:19-04:00Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Best OCR Software, Best Optical Character Recognition Software, Cloud OCR, Compare OCR Software, Machine Learning, NLP, OCR Engine, OCR Library, OCR SDK, OCR Solution, SDK OCR|

OCR Library

What is TCO (total cost of ownership)?

Total Cost of Ownership

Front-End Cost

Cost of Support and Maintenance

What is OCR?

Benefits of using OCR

If not for the trees then do it for the savings on paper, toner, copiers and their services contracts, etc.

How much time is wasted searching for paper files? Digital documents can searched and viewed instantly from anywhere.

Paper is much harder to backup and restore than digital data.

Office square footage and off-site records storage adds to the cost of keeping paper documents.

Government mandates for records retention […]

Introducing Robotic Process Automation

Using RPA with OCR Data Capture

Another solution is OCR to Database direct approach. […]

Automation

OCR

Barcodes

Document Scanners & Scanner Parts

Title

Document Scanners
& Scanner Parts