At a high level, Datacap functions can be organized into three areas: (1) Acquisition of documents from several sources; (2) Processing of documents to extract useful information; and (3) Delivery of content and data to back-end systems. These functions are integrated into a task flow that controls the processing of the documents from acquisition to delivery, with background tasks whenever the processing can be automated, and with foreground tasks when human interaction is required, such resolving errors and ambiguities in the extracted data.

Datacap handles the following main functions:

• Acquires paper documents from scanners, multifunction printers, or mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets
• Imports electronic documents or existing images from a file system, fax, or email server
• Cleans up images and prepares documents to improve data extraction with image-processing capabilities, such as de-skewing, removing lines, smears, and borders
• Classifies and separates document based on type to determine which data needs to be extracted
• Extracts data by using recognition technologies:
  • Optical character recognition (OCR) for machine-printed characters;
  • Intelligent character recognition (ICR) for handwriting, typically detached block letters;
  • Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR) for cursive writing on checks or forms and in other well identified contexts – IWR is not part of the
  • Standard Datacap workflow but is an add -on module from EDAC;
  • Optical mark recognition (OMR) for identifying checked boxes and other marks, such as bubbles in surveys or a signature on a form;
  • Bar code reading of several types, including one-dimensional bar codes, such as those used for price reference in stores, or two dimensional bar codes that are used to encode much larger sets of data, such as name, address, or shipping information.
• Checks the accuracy of extracted information and corrects errors against business rules
• Datacap can also automatically look up information in a database from the partially recognized data. It can trigger verification and validation by a human operator when confidence in the data accuracy is below a set level.
• Learns automatically from the experience of human operators and the processing of documents to improve accuracy over time
• Exports image documents and extracted data to FileNet Content Manager or other ECM repositories, databases, or business applications
• Organizes the flow of tasks in the capture process from scan to export, including handling of exceptions, into a workflow
• Controls access to the system and tasks by using functional security
• Monitors progress of capture operations and fixes problems in real time
• Reports on capture operations and provides statistics about how well the system is performing.

Whatever your needs are, EDAC can help choose and implement the perfect advanced capture solution that meets your needs and more.