FileHound Introduces Intelligent Data Capture - Built In!
We're pleased to announce some exciting new feature developments available to FileHound customers, both new and existing. Our Product Lead Rick Emmines explains.
Over the past year or so, the FileHound team have been working hard on a major new feature enhancement, designed to bring more value and automation to our customers. To best explain it, let's take a brief step back through history (sure, it sounds a little grandios, but stay with me)...
"Can I Get That In Writing?"
Since the beginning of recorded history, we humans have been using the written word to capture important information. For thousands of years this has been going on, and you can only imagine the scale of advancements which have occurred in the domain of writing in that time, from handwriting to print and eventually modern day word processing.
The problem with capturing important data in writing, though - is that it needs a human eye to decipher the information in order to make it useful again.
In recent years we’ve seen slow but steady advancements in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, but OCR is still only capable of converting printed text into digital text. Actually making use of extracted text requires the addition of context . What good is an extracted Order Reference number, for example, if we don't know it’s a reference number? Without context all we have is an ambiguous collection of random text data. Sometimes pages and pages of it.
Data needs context to be useful.
What is Intelligent Capture?
This is where Intelligent Capture comes in. For those not familiar with Intelligent Capture, I'll provide a 'fly by the seat of your pants' overview.
Intelligent Capture solutions utilise various forms of OCR, but typically also apply a process called Key Value Pairing to 'label' the extracted text with a contextual value. This labelling gives meaning to important pieces of information, making them far easier to search and retrieve, as well as more useful in workflow applications.
This allows intelligent capture to enable businesses to digitise and even automate repetitive processes, such as order processing, application form processing, or invoice processing.
This is all well and good - but there’s just one problem...
Traditionally, Intelligent Capture solutions have been pretty 'old skool'. Many of these solutions are stand-alone, complex to setup, and can only be deployed on premises. In addition to this, they're often prohibitively expensive to license and implement - particularly for small businesses. With some of the higher end solutions costing tens of thousands of pounds in license costs alone. Not to mention the headache of integrating them with your current systems.
The result of all this is that despite their potential to transform and streamline repetitive, analogue business processes, intelligent capture solutions are not widely implemented, except in larger enterprise organisations who can justify the return on investment.
This begs the question, what about the rest of us? Challenge accepted!
At FileHound our mission is to bring enterprise-level business intelligence capabilities to all sizes of organisations. We're passionate about creating tools that enable any organisations to digitise their business processes in order to 'give back time', improve quality and provide operational efficiencies. Importantly, we're committed to offering a cloud-hosted solution, fully managed by us and easy to use for you.
Introducing FileHound Smart Capture
We’re excited to announce that FileHound Smart Capture is now available. And the best part, this feature is built right in! There's absolutely no need for third party capture solutions, nothing to install on premises and nothing to install on your scanning devices or workstation.
All you need is the internet and a FileHound subscription.
How Does it Work?
To provide an example, let's take a standard business invoice;
The text ‘INV-71983’ on this invoice would be ‘value paired’ with the label ‘Invoice Reference’ and hence can be made useful to a system which understands what to do with invoices.
When we combine this with more labels, such as 'Date’, ‘P.O. Reference’ and 'Total' , we can utilise this information in more interesting and powerful ways using digital workflows.
FileHound Smart Capture extracts key value pair data and indexes your documents automatically!
If you’re a business and are looking to automate the manual input and processing steps for repetitive, static documents such as invoices, order forms or other common or templated forms - FileHound can help. Our intelligent capture functionality can locate and extract key information from common documents and ‘auto-magically’ index them.
How do I get it?
FileHound Smart Capture not only eliminates manual data entry for your business administrators, it makes the information extracted more valuable to you. Captured data can be more easily searched and filtered, and can also be utilised to ‘kick-off’ document workflows, allowing you to completely automate manual, analogue business processes end-to-end!
Want to try it? Simply get in touch and provide us with some sample documents and we’ll show you what’s possible with FileHound Smart Capture.
About The Author
Rick Emmines is a passionate and experienced technologist, who has developed and delivered digital transformation programmes within multiple industries and sectors, including Healthcare, Education, Housing and Retail.
Rick has worked on innovative projects in the UK and abroad, bringing his skills, professionalism and experience from a career of working in technology. Rick's resume boasts a broad range of roles at companies such as Apple Inc and Three Mobile.
Rick's people-first focus and obsessive attention to detail, added with his infectious enthusiasm for creating amazing experiences, give the FileHound team the motivation and direction to deliver the best solutions possible for our users.