Nowadays lots of organizations are encouraging the concept of a paperless office. They are scanning their old paper documents into scanned PDFs and then uploading them to their new document management system. Once these paper documents and records are scanned and transferred to their new DMS or ECM systems, many organizations face a very common problem, text searchability of the scanned PDFs. Now they are ended up with thousands of scanned PDFs that take up lots of digital storage space, these newly scanned documents are just images. They can’t be searched, or they don’t allow copying of text. The information trapped in these digital systems is like a big unknown black box. If somebody wants to search for a specific keyword or phrase, they have to manually surf through heaps of scanned PDFs. How can they solve this new problem in data discovery? The magic word for the solution is “OCR” or optical character recognition. 

Benefits of adding  OCR to your document management system

OCR technology can detect and recognize the text content of an image file. A searchable PDF software can add this text as an invisible layer in the scanned PDF. This text layer can be indexed and accessed with ease using the right document management system. OCR software converts your scanned documents to a new searchable digital format. This new digital format is called “Searchable PDF”. Searchable PDF is an enhanced version of your scanned PDF. 

All you have to do is Install a good OCR PDF software and apply OCR on the scanned PDFs in your document management system. An OCR Software runs OCR against the scanned file, detects and recognizes the text content, then adds a hidden text layer on top of the scanned image. This image and hidden text layer are merged together to form a “sandwich PDF” file otherwise commonly known as a searchable PDF. So, by applying this searchable PDF conversion to the scanned files in your document management system, you are making them text searchable. Now it is easy to search through the scanned files to find the specific document you need and then search within the scanned document itself. After applying OCR and converting scanned files into searchable PDFs, you may also notice that it is much easier to copy a block of text from this new OCRed file.

How can I add OCR functionality to my document management system?

If you want to add OCR functionality to your document management system, you should consider installing an auto OCR software. It is not practical to run manual OCR on thousands of scanned documents. An auto OCR software runs in the background and converts all scanned PDFs in a folder to searchable PDFs. One of our clients has more than 5 years of scanned contract documents in their DMS and sometimes they want these contracts to be amended and re-signed. Previously they have employed casual workers to re-type the entire contract again by looking into the printout of scanned documents. With our OCR software, they automated the conversion of old scanned contracts. After OCR, they can copy and paste the text from the searchable PDFs and create new updated contracts without having to re-type all text content.

So if you want to add OCR functionality to your DMS, install OCRvision in the machine and configure your documents folder as a magic folder. OCRvision will run in the background and automatically convert all scanned documents to searchable PDFs. 

Please watch the video below for more details.