Electronic Data Capture is the process of extracting, formatting, arranging and storing information from a document into data readable by a computer to make it easy to search for information and retrieve the data as needed.
Decades ago, companies from various industries relied on the tedious process of employees entering information manually into forms. As a result, organizations spent a considerable amount of time, money and resources dedicated to producing and maintaining paper forms.
If your company still relies on using paper forms, should you switch? Here are a few benefits that electronic data capture solutions offer any workplace.
The cost of printing and maintaining paperwork can be expensive. It involves sub costs like equipment management, paper records maintenance, cost of storage space and it doesn’t make sense to use highly qualified staff for repetitive manual work. Electronic data capture solutions reduce or completely eliminate these costs and provides savings for your company that extends to labor costs, technology investments, and upgrade costs. No more wasted time and money!
Did you know that it takes an employee an average of 12 minutes to find the paper document they are looking for. Additionally, paper documents can also cause clutter in your office making things disorganized and hard to accomplish tasks. With electronic data capture, organizations will be able to instantly digitize documents, making them readily available and instantly retrievable. This makes it a breeze to search for documents as files are digitally stored. No more spending hours searching for a document!
Data is essential to improve your business workflow and gaining a competitive advantage. All data collected through Electronic Data Capture allows you to take the time to analyze the data thoroughly and take the necessary steps to identify problems, find the appropriate solutions and implement them successfully. Through Data Capture, you can gain a competitive advantage especially when it comes to capturing critical data that are used to make strategic decisions.
One of the main issues with paper and manual keying is the high error rate. A customer may fill in a form incorrectly or the person keying the information into the system may also make an error. With electronic data capture, you can reduce the number of errors during the capture stage. This also makes it easier to cross-reference data and validate it as well as indexing information. Delivering great service is easier when your information is accurate!
Information stored in paper formats is degradable information, and it degrades further every time it is handled manually by employees. Paper documents are also fragile and unable to be recovered once their damaged which can be costly for some companies. Electronic data capture ensures that your company’s most important data is saved and preserved for the future in digitized format.
Click here to learn more about our data capture solutions or contact us to get started. We can help you decide what processes will work best for different areas of your business.