Congratulations.  You have just begun a journey that will result in improved productivity, better performance, lower cost and increased competitiveness for your organization.  But first, you need to get up to speed on the terms and concepts of the Capture Industry.

Luckily, you have come to the right place.  Datacap has prepared a Capture Primer, with resources to cover all that you may need to understand what Capture is and what it can do for your department or organization.

What is Capture?

Capture refers to the techniques used to scan and index documents for storage in an image management (also called a document management) system.  Capture can also refer to the extraction of data from paper forms, such as invoices, tax returns, claims and subscription documents for processing by other systems. Because Capture is at the front end of the transformation of paper to digital form, it is often referred to a component of Electronic Content Management (ECM).

Simply put, Capture eliminates manual data entry, either the indexing of images or the typing of data from forms into legacy systems. Capture uses many technologies, including scanning, image enhancement, recognition, database matching, and Graphical User Interface (GUI) to automatically apply indexes to images or extract data from documents.

OCR is The Engine of Capture

The most notable technology in the Capture process is recognition, and by that we mean the identifying of typed print, hand print, bar code or check boxes. While it sounds miraculous, the fact is that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character recognition (ICR), developed over the past 20 years, is capable of reading every character on a page, even free form handwriting.  The performance always depends on a number of factors, such as document quality, legibility, and document layout, but the fact remains, that these technologies are quite impressive. 

Data entry remains a multi-billion dollar annual burden for organizations around the world.  As costs rise for maintaining manual data entry in-house, many are facing a daunting choice: outsource data entry or implement a capture system. Many more are maintaining control over document processing and keeping important data within the organization. You’ll find that in most cases, Capture delivers a much more significant return on investment than Outsourcing.  But that will be for you to decide. 

Until that day comes, select from the links below to learn more about the building blocks of Capture: scanning, image enhancement, recognition, validations, verification and export formatting.