User Guide

Automated forms processing
Automated forms processing: step by step
Where data capture should be used?
There are numerous situations when automated forms pro
cessing is the only right solution. Here are some possible scenarios.

Forms processing is not the main speciality of a company.
Manufacturing or trading companies in most cases don't even
have a department responsible for forms processing. Forms,
such as order bills, are usually processed manually by secre
taries or office assistants. Everything runs smoothly if the com
pany needs to process no more than several dozen forms. But
processing hundreds of forms requires additional staff, other
wise there will be long waiting lists and the personnel will be
distracted from their main job of communication with cus
tomers.
Solution: installing a forms processing application, such as
ABBYY FormReader Desktop Edition. The entire system can be
placed on one desk and does not require additional staff or main
tenance.

Processing questionnaires is one of the major business
processes of a company. A good example is a marketing
agency that collects and analyses data. Sometimes such agen
cies need to process tens of thousands of forms per day. In this
case data capture is part of the entire technological process and
selecting a data capture solution has its own specifics.
Firstly, the volume of incoming information varies greatly and
depends on the customer's needs and the scale of a particular
survey. Therefore
scalability is crucial, so that the agency can
easily increase its throughput.
Secondly, in the case of a marketing agency, investing into
automated forms processing means investing into means of
production. Consequently,
the ROI must be easy to calcu
late.
Thirdly, questionnaires will change significantly from survey to
survey, and the marketing agency will need a
tool for design
ing new forms.
In this case, ABBYY FormReader Enterprise Edition would be
the ideal choice. This is a highly scalable solution whose productiv
ity can be increased by organizing distributed forms processing and
adding new modules.

Converting archives into electronic form. In most cases this
job has to be done only once, but the amount of information to
be processed is considerable  a paper archive may take up sev
eral rooms. At the same time archive owners often do not have
the sufficient administrative or financial resources to hire addi
tional personnel.
In this case time required to install and set up a data capture solu
tion is not so crucial. What is important is its ease of use and effi
ciency. ABBYY FormReader Desktop Edition would be the ideal
solution for archives.
ABBYY offers a very attractive licensing scheme which takes
into account the number of pages processed by FormReader. The
licence allows you to process a certain number of pages, and once
this allowed number has been used up, FormReader becomes inop
erable. Next time you need to process a known number of pages
you will simply need to renew your licence. This approach is par
ticularly suitable for situations similar to the one described above.
It is quite possible that your company needs to solve a similar
task. But how do you set about choosing the right solution? Where
do you start?