The Current State Of OCR

AnyDoc Software recently attended a conference of accounts payable professionals, where we sponsored a guest speaker. The speaker provided comment cards for feedback of his performance and content. On one card was a remark that floored me:

"OCR? That doesn't work."

I was stunned.

Was this merely the perception of one individual, or did it reflect the views of a significant portion of the workforce? Minus focus group data or other matrices, it's impossible to tell; however, it certainly was troubling. Troubling because not only has OCR been proven to work, but it works quite well.

Perhaps the perception of that one individual helps illustrate why only a small portion (approximately 15%) of businesses that could benefit from a solid data and document capture solution has actually taken advantage of it.

In order to bridge that gap, our industry needs to better educate the public about the strength and efficiency of OCR (and its companion, ICR) and how it can revolutionize data workflow. With any luck, people like our friend from the conference will begin to see OCR with different eyes, and those of us in the industry will have a renewed determination to inform businesses of all stripes of the benefits an OCR solution can provide.