| Automated Forms Processing technology is doing for organizations what the tractor and other farm equipment did for farmers, it's an operations automation dream come true. It has the potential to deliver a wealth of benefits and strategic advantages to any organization or operation that requires processing high-volumes of structured forms, that normally require thousands of human-hours to process manually.
In this age of "e-commerce everything", there are still millions of businesses and organizations relying on non-electronic forms that are filled each day by millions if not billions of people. To businesses such as catalog or mail-order houses, financial institutions, and many others, filled forms directly translates to hard-dollars, or simply big money for those of you not in a dollar currency or money exchange system.
Automated Forms Processing equally benefits operations that are not necessarily in the business of selling goods and services. This advanced technology also benefits operations such as non-for-profit organizations, government, educational institutions, religious entities and so forth, simply by easing the way that information is ingested and digested within the organization by time and operational cost savings.
The whole idea of having forms in the first place, is for purposes of gathering specific process-critical information to make indications and decisions. Getting someone to fill out a form is only the beginning of such process, in fact, it's the easy and inexpensive part. Reading and transferring the information to a computer system for efficient analysis and processing is the complicated and costly portion.
Luckily, technology has advanced rapidly over the past few years where forms can be read by electronics technology and information can be automatically transferred to computer databases with little, or no human intervention. Let's face it, not only is human based processing laborious and expensive, but mere mortals as intelligent as we are make mistakes all the time. Otherwise, what would be the point of spell checking software?
Automated Forms Processing can only be effective when paper forms are converted to high-quality electronic images. In order to do this, appropriate scanning equipment and capture system configuration is critical.
This eGuide will explain how forms processing systems operate and describe the various components and component features required for efficient, effective, and accurate automated forms processing. |
