Numerous service apps and mobile applications for digital document management already provide scan tools to digitize paper documents. Now, it’s time to take this one step further and make these documents automatically processable. This is where document data extraction comes into play.
Modern document data extraction software leverages Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and machine-learning algorithms to detect and extract data from structured documents. This data can then be used for further processing.
It eliminates the need to manually enter information from documents, such as passports or medical certificates, decreasing error rates and speeding up workflows.
Learn more about the advantages that automated document data extraction offers and in which cases to use it in this article.
What is data extraction?
Traditionally, document data extraction involves manual processes of identifying and retrieving relevant information from various types of documents. However, this proved to be slow, labor-intensive, and prone to human error.
In today’s automated workflows, text recognition software, like OCR, plays an essential role in processing scanned text documents.
While simple scanners only produce a digital image of a document, OCR technology goes one step further and converts its content into a digital text format that computers can understand and process.
However, this useful technology might not be the best fit for all use cases. The problem? It works with all data in a document, including filler words, payment information, or explanatory texts.
What is the automated data extraction process?
On the other hand, data extraction technology analyzes these challenging unstructured or poorly structured documents before extracting only relevant information – based on machine learning algorithms.
This is mostly important for documents that contain redundant data, such as invoice numbers, dates, or totals. Data extraction technology collects only the required information from such documents and transfers it to your backend system, where further processing can be performed immediately.
Which documents can be captured by data extraction?
Data extraction is, therefore, a valuable feature for digital document management. But a more interesting question is: “How can your company benefit from data extraction?”. In the paragraphs below, we have collected some interesting examples of document capture use cases for you:
- Customer Identification: MRZ Scanners extract data from identification documents by analyzing the machine-readable zone (MRZ) included in passports and ID cards. All core information is then immediately displayed on the end user’s device and forwarded to the back-end.
- Healthcare: Scanbot SDK’s EHIC Scanner can extract information from European health insurance cards. This speeds up data processing in different healthcare sectors and helps you create efficient workflows, as data from complex documents no longer needs to be processed manually.
- Invoices/receipts/other forms/serial numbers: With the Scanbot SDK Text Pattern Scanner, you can extract any single-line string of characters without scanning the whole document. This allows you to decide which information is needed for a specific purpose, flexibly. The data is immediately ready for further processing, and also no longer needs to be processed manually.
- Hospitality: A Credit Card Scanner facilitates bookings for flights, hotels, and car rentals by automatically extracting the card number (Primary Account Number or PAN), cardholder name, and expiration date.
- Fleet management: To access vehicle history reports and other technical information, a VIN Scanner enables error-free and quick VIN search in vehicle data banks.
- Banking: Integrating a Check Scanner into a customer-facing application supports solutions such as check truncation, in which checks are processed automatically.
Automated vs. manual document data extraction
We’ve collected the most striking benefits of automated data extraction in comparison with manual data extraction for you:
- Cost efficiency/Return on Investment (ROI): Considerable amounts of time can be saved by eliminating manual data entry and correction. Furthermore, the integration of scanning tools reduces the costs for any postal dispatch of documents, while mobile scanners like smartphones are significantly less expensive to maintain and purchase than regular hardware scanners.
- Speed: Data extraction accelerates your workflow significantly.
- Convenience: Your employees do not have to filter data from photographs or scans of low quality, but can work immediately with the automatically collected data.
- Customer Satisfaction: Simplified digital services and fast processing of requests are essential for today’s customers. Since most customers have modern smartphones, this solution can easily be made available to every user.
- Versatility: The data scanner can be used to cover and automate a wide range of use cases.
- Scalability: Automated document extraction allows for speedy processing, and therefore enables handling more documents than with manual processing in the same time. Besides, document extraction software is easily scalable and can be used on several devices.
- Accuracy: Manual data extraction is error-prone. An automated solution prevents human error and increases accuracy.
- Integration into existing systems: Data extraction software can be integrated into existing systems, such as ERPs and CRMs.
Integrate document data extraction into your mobile or web app
The Scanbot SDK Data Capture Modules extract data from a broad range of structured documents. Our solution includes MRZ scanning, credit card scanning, text pattern scanning, and many more.
Thanks to our pre-built Ready-to-Use UI components, you can integrate a highly customizable, user-friendly interface into your application within hours. For an even more customizable solution, opt for our Classic UI components instead.
Our solutions are tried-and-tested – we listen to our customers’ feedback and regularly update our solutions.
Customers like ETE Reman value the easy integration our solution offers, and the comprehensive support that comes with it. Without the Scanbot SDK, they wouldn’t have been able to offer a real-time VIN scanning feature in their solution.
At all times do we value the privacy of sensitive data. That’s why data is always processed on the device, without connection to our servers.
Would you like to integrate data extraction into your mobile or web app? Then send us a message at sdk@scanbot.io.
