User Guide

Organizing Automated Forms Processing
Organizing automated forms processing
Approaches to data capture
If you take into account such factors as the quality of entered
data, the speed of processing and the working conditions of the
operators, data capture applications are hard to beat. Automated
data capture becomes economically viable whenever you need to
process 100 forms per day or more.
But even relatively small processing volumes will require certain
changes in how the working process is organized. Processing thou
sands of forms per day is a huge task that will need significant
changes in organization and administration.
Data capture can be organized in one of the following ways:
forms may be processed as soon as they are submitted, or forms
may be first collected and then processed in batches. In the former
case the data capture solution will be implemented in the front
office, and in the latter case it will be implemented in the back
office.
Frontoffice data capture
A good example of the first approach is a data capture solution
installed in a warehouse of a trading company. A client wishing to
place an order fills in an order form where he states the name and
number of the goods he wishes to purchase. This form must be
processed as soon as it gets to the staff of the warehouse, who will
issue an invoice. The invoice will be paid by the client while the
warehouse staff pack the ordered goods. This means that the data
capture application must be installed directly in the warehouse.
This kind of application will have a number of distinctive features:
1. The speed of scanning in this particular case is not very crucial,
because packing and loading goods takes a lot more time than
scanning orders. This means that even a flatbed scanner will
do. (It takes modern scanners 3040 minutes to scan an A4
page, which is quite acceptable in this case.)
All data capture is performed at one desk where the client sub
mits his order form. Even additional operations which are not
directly related to data capture may also be performed at this desk,
e.g. printing out an invoice, archiving the paper order, etc.
In situations like the one above ABBYY FormReader Desktop
Edition will be the ideal choice.
Incoming forms
Operator using a scanner and ABBYY
FormReader Desktop Edition
Database
Incoming forms