Handwriting recognition is no longer a roadblock in digital transformation. With Ephesoft and Vidado, we have the technology to meet modern expectations from analog inputs like handwriting.
Digital transformation means something different to every one of our customers. Often times, we start simply with the inputs your organization receives.
In insurance, mortgage, and other financial services, regulators often still require a paper form to make changes to a current account or to apply for some sort of financial transaction (insurance claims, account withdrawals, name changes, etc). When your company requires analog inputs, how do you keep up with digital expectations of today’s business world? Your customers not only want instant service. They need to know what step they are in in your process. Capture technology and OCR tried to solve this problem, but could never overcome one big hurdle: handwriting recognition.
Deploying workarounds
Instead of applying capture technology, many of our customers have moved on from analog inputs and channels. They’re developing digital applications or mobile applications to intake information and bypass traditional paper forms altogether. However, there remains a contingent of customers who want to submit changes or forms the old-fashioned way.
Over the past decade, capture technology became commoditized. Few differences existed between the major competing capture technologies—and they were overly complicated. They promised customers information extraction off of any form, which could then be sent to downstream systems. All you had to do was set up a template for every possible variation of your forms. This became costly and time consuming. Thus, many customers used their capture technology only to classify what type of document they were looking at and then filed it into their repository. We frequently work with customers who are still manually classifying these documents by looking at each and every one of them as they come in. They never realized the return on investment.
Improvements in Capture Technology
Over the past few years, some major strides have been made in the capture sector. Ten years ago, Zia Consulting started working with Ephesoft. Ephesoft utilizes non-zonal OCR that no longer requires you to define every possible template. Additionally, it was probably better at automatically classifying what sort of document it was looking at. Digital automation and transformation, here we come! Now, if only we could sort out the handwriting issue and deliver the original promise of automating your analog inputs.
Ephesoft and Vidado
Fortunately, through our partnership with Vidado, Zia Consulting implements solutions that provide 90%+ accuracy on handwriting recognition. It functions as an Ephesoft integration. This provides a seamless experience for digitizing and ingesting your forms, whether they have handwriting or not.
Today, we can finally fulfill the promise from decades ago and deliver it with a real return on investment. Zia Consulting and its partners now provide a document ingestion and capture solution that will automatically classify your documents after you scan them and can handle typed text and handwriting. The goal is total automation, but you can still allow your users to review any document if it doesn’t satisfy certain rules.
In the world of digital transformation, the principal of “garbage in, garbage out” is king. The Zia document ingestion solution is the first big step in digitally transforming your business. Check out these resources available to aid your organization in digital transformation: