Signing On for the Electronic Document Opportunity

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Electronic documents

A full 90% report they do some scanning of forms and documents.

Of the 73% of respondents who specifically scan forms, only half use text recognition to capture data. A quarter only scan to archive and the remaining quarter scan images, but also manually re-key the data.

24% of those surveyed say they plan to implement some type of text-recognition software.

For all respondents, an average productivity improvement of 31% was anticipated as a result of the automation of recognition of hand-written text. 28% of respondents anticipated a productivity improvement of 50% or more.

For 40%, half or more of inbound forms have handwritten data fields. For 29%, half or more of their forms have hand-written free text or open-ended data fields.

A full 55% have signatures on half or more of their forms. And 25%, have processes that require signatures to be matched and verified. For 45%, it would be extremely or very useful to automatically match signatures on contracts and purchase agreements.

44% would find it extremely or very useful to recognize hand-written keywords on open-ended form fields or business documents.

37% of AIIM members have never assessed ICR while 59% report having used optical character recognition (OCR) software. Only 43% have assessed ICR in the past two years.

Only 25% outsource the processing of forms, and most of those who do only outsource a small percentage.

27% cite the fact that they have too many different types of forms while a little over 25% say they don’t have enough critical mass across business units to implement.

For 35% of ICR users, the payback period is 12 months or less; 55% see an ROI within 18 months.