Technical FAQs
Since they first rolled out in supermarkets in the 1970s, barcodes and barcode scanners have become essential tools in today’s globalized economy. No longer confined to retail shelves and supplier warehouses, barcodes are used across multiple industries to streamline operations and improve data accuracy. Given their continued importance, it’s helpful for developers to keep the key advantages of barcodes in mind as they build applications that could benefit from them.
Four Key Barcode Benefits
1. Efficiency
Since scanning a barcode automatically enters a large amount of data into a system, they are incredibly valuable for streamlining recordkeeping and improving efficiency. Modern supply chain and inventory management simply would not be possible without the use of barcodes. Rather than manually entering inventory and shipment data for every item into a system, employees can simply scan entire pallets, crates, and even shipping containers to instantly know what contents they contain inside. Given the sheer scale of products moving through a supply chain, barcodes allow companies to automate a key process to save time and money even as they scale operations. Barcode scanners can also streamline onboarding and training since it takes much less time to teach someone to use a scanner than to manually enter data.
2. Error Reduction
Manual data entry is notorious for its high levels of human error. According to research conducted over several decades, even workplaces with the best performance measures in place see human error rates of five to ten failures in every hundred opportunities. That’s a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, whether it takes the form of inverted characters, skipped lines, misreadings, illegible markings, or faulty keystrokes. Even worse, once an error occurs, it will often be reproduced across a system, making it very difficult to locate and remediate the original mistake. According to one estimate, errors resulting in bad data cost businesses more than $600 billion each year. Scanning a barcode, by contrast, completely automates the data entry process and significantly reduces the risks associated with manual errors. Information encoded into a barcode will be reproduced accurately each and every time the image is scanned to ensure consistency across systems.
3. Tracking
Each time a barcode is scanned, it creates another step in a data trail that can be easily referenced to locate items and events. This allows businesses to greatly improve real-time visibility into their operations. From identifying a shipment’s most recent location or determining whether or not a patient picked up their prescription from a pharmacy, barcodes help organizations and customers alike to track down information quickly and accurately. By improving visibility throughout their systems, companies can deliver a better customer experience that builds trust and prioritizes transparency. Since barcodes are easy to create and print, they can be added to almost any type of business process to streamline productivity and track essential activities.
4. Data Collection
Today’s organizations rely heavily upon data analytics to formulate their business strategy and make key decisions. The more data they have available to them, the more nuanced and accurate their analysis will be. Barcodes play a critical role in data collection strategies. Not only are they used to gather information about inventory, supply chain, and sales activity, but the latest generation of QR codes (a common form of 2d barcode) are also being deployed to learn more about customer behavior and preferences. Thanks to real-time QR code tracking, companies can see how many times the barcode is scanned, where it was scanned, and what devices were used to scan it. Gathering more extensive barcode data provides a more detailed picture of what’s actually happening “on the ground” throughout an organization and in the market. By eliminating conjecture and guesswork, businesses can make much more informed decisions that will help them to sustainably scale operations and capitalize on opportunities.
Barcode Use Cases by Industry
Although most commonly associated with retail and logistics, barcode scanners are deployed across many industries to improve efficiency and accuracy. Here are a few of the most common use cases:
- Education: From student ID cards to tracking school equipment, educational institutions utilize a variety of barcode types and barcode scanners to streamline operations.
- Government: Federal, state, and local governments use barcode scanning to manage access to secure facilities, catalog physical assets, and organize records. The ability to quickly create barcodes is essential for agencies that need to catalog and track documents and materials.
- Legal, Insurance, & Finance: Various forms of barcodes can be used to improve document management, making it easier to track and organize contracts, applications, and invoices as well as flag sensitive documents that require additional security precautions.
- Healthcare: Barcodes have long been used to streamline hospital processes such as admitting patients and accessing patient records with a simple scan rather than a protracted (and error-prone) manual process. They are especially useful for managing medications and ensuring that critical prescription information like strength and dosage remains accurate and consistent.
- Retail: A classic use case for barcode scanning, retailers use barcodes every day to manage their inventory, track sales, and reduce shrink. Handheld barcode scanners have made it easier than ever for them to process transactions, access product information, and locate products.
- Supply Chain: Barcode scanning technology has helped to automate key elements of logistics across multiple industries. As companies continue to do business around the world, the ability to easily track shipments and provide information to customs authorities is more crucial than ever before.
Implementing Your Barcode Solution
Despite the clear benefits of barcodes, many applications lack the basic functionality necessary to read barcodes, much less write them. Luckily, integrating those features is easy to do with the help of a code-based SDK barcode toolkit like Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress. With support for more than 30 barcode types and the powerful image processing capabilities that can clean up and repair barcodes that are broken, damaged, or poorly printed, Barcode Xpress can enhance the functionality of barcode scanners or allow Windows and Linux-based systems to locate and read barcodes on documents. Capable of reading up to 1,000 pages per minute, Barcode Xpress can turn your application into a barcode scanning powerhouse. Visit our product overview to learn more about how Barcode Xpress can solve your application’s barcode scanning needs.
Although often considered a bit old fashioned, the insurance industry has made great strides in recent years to adapt to the changing needs of its customers. The latest generation of insurance customers expects faster service, better support, and more options from providers. Given these pressures, it’s no surprise that InsurTech developers have found ample opportunities to deliver solutions that help insurance firms better manage their workflows and create better customer experiences.
Despite the successes of this digital transformation, however, there are still a number of challenges that InsurTech developers face when building new applications. Investing heavily in creating powerful AI and big data tools might help those platforms stand out from the crowd, but they won’t find much success with firms if they don’t also provide the core functionality organizations need to service their customers.
That’s why many InsurTech developers are turning to versatile SDK and API integrations to expand their feature sets without compromising their development timelines.
4 Major Challenges of InsurTech Applications
1. Security and Privacy
As the insurance industry continues to shift toward digital processes and platforms, it’s become more important than ever for InsurTech applications to keep sensitive data secure. While most organizations do invest in cybersecurity protections, they often don’t realize how their own practices could potentially pose a risk to customer information. This is especially true of insurers that rely on third-party programs for various tasks like document viewing and editing. Take, for instance, the case of Folksam Group, which inadvertently shared client data from as many as one million customers with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Adobe in late 2020.
2. File Management
Today’s insurers are receiving all kinds of documents, files, and images from their customers, which creates something of a document dilemma. A single auto accident claim, for instance, might have valuable information spread across multiple PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheet files, scanned images of hand-written forms, and image files. In order to process claims quickly and effectively, firms need InsurTech solutions that provide an all-in-one solution that can handle a broad array of file formats. Without these file management tools, insurers will be forced to use multiple programs to meet their needs, which creates inefficient dependencies and increases security risks.
3. Data Collection
Insurance companies gather quite a bit of information from form applications, both in physical and digital formats. Unfortunately, transferring that information from a form document into an InsurTech system is often a laborious manual process. Not only is manual data collection time consuming, it also increases the likelihood of human error. Even when firms do implement an InsurTech solution with forms processing capabilities, however, they often lack the capability to read certain types of form fields, especially those completed by hand. The ability to adapt to new form templates is also critical for organizations that want to invest in automation.
4. Remote Collaboration
The COVID-19 pandemic may have forced insurance offices to rapidly embrace a remote work strategy, but many firms had already been investing in some form of hybrid work model for years. Nationwide was able to transition 98 percent of its workforce to remote status precisely because the company already had the technology solutions in place to allow insurance agents to work from home. Without some way of facilitating remote collaboration directly through InsurTech applications, organizations end up relying on email, which poses serious security concerns. Furthermore, with multiple copies of a document being distributed and downloaded, it quickly becomes difficult to know which version incorporates the most up-to-date changes.
SDK and API InsurTech Solutions
Building new functionality into an application always involves a tradeoff. When developers choose to code something from scratch, that means pulling team members away from another project or extending the product’s release timeline. In a fast-moving industry where InsurTech developers are racing competitors to be the first to market, it doesn’t make sense to design and build every aspect of an application in-house.
Rather than pulling valuable development resources away from their innovative InsurTech features, developers can solve common insurance challenges much faster with SDK toolkits and API integrations.
Secure File Viewing
The easiest way for InsurTech solutions to keep documents secure is to integrate HTML5 viewing capabilities directly into the application. Rather than being forced to download or open a file for viewing in a third-party application, employees can view multiple document formats natively. This is critical because it means no data will be shared with third-party programs. Since the files remain safely within the secure InsurTech environment, firms can also control the level of access to any document, which prevents unauthorized individuals from downloading or viewing the contents. Thanks to API-based integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer, InsurTech developers can help their applications safely view more than 100 unique file types without any third-party dependencies.
Data Capture
By integrating forms processing capabilities into their applications, InsurTech developers can provide their clients with powerful tools that allow them to gather essential data quickly and accurately. As the essential connective tissue between customers and insurance databases, form field recognition integrations use OCR technology to intelligently identify form data and extract it for processing. They can also be set up to identify a wide range of insurance forms to quickly identify and scan documents to streamline processing workflows. Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms even goes a step further by incorporating powerful image cleanup functionality to ensure that data will be extracted as accurately as possible.
File Conversion
In order to meet the file management challenges of today’s insurance providers, InsurTech developers need document and image processing integrations that can read and write multiple file formats. Information spread across multiple documents, emails, or even texts can be processed using OCR technology, and then consolidated and converted into a variety of formats for easy reference and collaboration. Rather than juggling several files with different dependencies, an SDK integration like Accusoft’s ImageGear can easily output processed files in PDF, RTF, XML, or DOCX format for viewing and editing within a single application.
Editing and Annotation
Providing secure document viewing capabilities solves only one half of the insurance collaboration challenge. InsurTech applications also need to provide both internal and external stakeholders with the ability to edit and markup documents throughout the application and claims process. Content processing integrations can allow authorized users to make changes to documents completely within their InsurTech solution and review markups and comments from other collaborators.
Since all editing occurs within the application itself, there’s no need to worry about anyone downloading a document to make changes locally and creating confusion over which version is the most up-to-date. Redactions may also be necessary to hide private or confidential information from unauthorized viewers. As an added benefit, PrizmDoc Viewer’s editing features allow users to make a variety of markups and redactions while preserving the integrity of the original file.
Accelerate Your InsurTech Application Development with Accusoft
Accusoft’s collection of powerful SDK toolkits and API integrations provide innovative InsurTech developers with the resources they need to solve core insurance industry challenges. By implementing proven functionality into their applications, project managers can streamline the development process and dedicate more resources to the innovative features that will set their platform apart from the competition.
Whether you’re looking to incorporate versatile document viewing and editing or need a more accurate forms processing solution, Accusoft’s family of InsurTech SDKs and APIs can help your development team get to market faster. Learn more about what our products can do for your application in our InsurTech fact sheet.
Organized each year by ALM, LegalTech is one of the most important events for the legal industry. The conference brings together a broad variety of experienced legal professionals and innovative LegalTech providers to highlight the business, regulatory, technology, and talent trends in the market. In previous years, LegalTech was held in New York City and attended by more than 8000 people.
LegalTech 2021 Is Now Legalweek(year)
This year, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the organizers to take a different approach. The first decision involved shifting LegalTech from an in-person conference to a fully virtual event in order to protect the health of both attendees and organizers. While many industry events have made a similar transition, the LegalTech team went a step further by breaking the conference into a series of five interactive virtual events held over the course of 2021. This new virtual series was dubbed Legalweek(year) and aims to provide legal professionals with a powerful resource for working through an unprecedented era.
“This decision was made to address the needs of our legal community during these trying times of COVID-19 and to provide the type of innovative education, solutions, and connections that is so crucial to legal leaders,” said ALM’s Mark Fried. “The 2021 series will set the stage for a resurgence in the legal sector and a big ‘Welcome Back’ to attendees for our in-person Legalweek event (in 2022).”
The first virtual Legalweek(year) event is scheduled for February 2-4, 2021 and will feature bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams, legal AI expert Josua Walker, and former New Jersey governor and federal prosecutor Chris Christie as keynote speakers. Attendees will not only be able to participate remotely, but they will also have an additional six months worth of on-demand access to virtual content following each event.
Visit the Accusoft Legalweek(year) Virtual Booth
As a longtime sponsor of LegalTech, Accusoft is proud to participate in this groundbreaking series of virtual events. The conference has historically been a great opportunity for us to speak directly with the independent software vendors and legal IT professionals about the latest industry trends and LegalTech applications.
This year, we’ll be hosting a “virtual booth” through the Legalweek(year) event site. Whether you’re a developer looking to solve a particular software challenge or a project manager building an in-house solution for your firm, you’ll find plenty of resources and support at the Accusoft booth. Read through our numerous case studies and LegalTech whitepapers or schedule a meeting with one of our product specialists to learn more about our SDK and API integrations for legal software. You can even chat with someone in real time if you need a quick answer!
After completing registration, Legalweek(year) attendees can access the Accusoft virtual booth during the event simply by logging into their account.
Our LegalTech Solutions
Accusoft’s combination of content processing and conversion integrations help today’s innovative LegalTech applications reach their full potential. As law firms and legal departments incorporate more technology into their everyday operations, they need software tools capable of automating workflows, simplifying eDiscovery, and facilitating secure collaboration.
PrizmDoc Viewer
Our feature-rich HTML5 document viewer allows users to seamlessly view a variety of document and image files within their secure web application. Thanks to PrizmDoc Viewer’s powerful REST APIs, developers can provide additional functionality, such as annotations and redactions, that is essential for legal organizations.
PrizmDoc Editor
In addition to allowing users to edit DOCX files within the secure confines of their LegalTech applications, PrizmDoc Editor’s automated document assembly features streamlines the contract creation process to improve efficiency and accuracy. Documents can be assembled programmatically, incorporating commonly used or specific clauses, special language, and client data to eliminate “cut and paste” errors. Once documents are assembled, PrizmDoc Editor’s sharing tools allow firms to control access and ensure that everyone is working from the same up-to-date version.
ImageGear
With the ability to read, convert, and compress a wide range of files, our ImageGear SDK integration provides LegalTech applications with the tools they need to manage almost any type of file collected during the eDiscovery process. Powerful optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities allow ImageGear to read a wide variety of languages from around the world and convert scanned documents into searchable plain text or PDF files.
LegalTech in 2021 and Beyond
As legal organizations continue to make strides toward achieving true digital transformation, they will need versatile LegalTech applications capable of adapting along with them. Accusoft’s family of SDK and API integrations can help developers leverage the power of their innovative software tools and free up resources to focus on improving their core capabilities.
We hope you’ll join us at Legalweek(year) on February 2-4, 2021. Our booth will be available throughout the virtual event, so stop by to find out how Accusoft can help you realize the potential of your LegalTech applications.
The ability to watermark documents is essential for many businesses. By utilizing watermarks, organizations can quickly brand their assets and take steps to protect their valuable intellectual property. When identifying mission critical document features for their applications, developers need to keep in mind all the ways that watermarks continue to be deployed for a variety of use cases.
What Is a Watermark?
A watermark is a semi-transparent line of text or an image that is embedded into a file to indicate that it belongs to a person or organization and cannot be reproduced or distributed without permission. In most instances, watermarks are visible, but some text-based watermarks are embedded in such a way that they only become visible after the document is scanned or printed.
Digital watermarks are one of the earliest and most effective forms of security for documents and images. They are most commonly used by photographers who want to protect their images from unauthorized usage. Their watermark is superimposed over the image, making it difficult to remove without also damaging the source image in the process.
The same basic principle applies to documents, especially PDF files that are easy to download, view, and distribute. Many organizations continue to add specialized watermarks to their documents to protect both confidential information and intellectual property. Understanding which types of watermarks to use and why is an important aspect of effective document security.
Why Should You Watermark Documents?
There are a few reasons why an organization may want to watermark documents. Although they’re most often associated with security, they can be used for other purposes as well. Here are a few major use cases involving document watermarks:
Classify Documents More Easily
File management can be a challenge for organizations of all sizes. While steps like naming conventions can help somewhat, it can be difficult to keep track of which files can be shared openly and which ones should only be opened and viewed within a secure application environment. Watermarks can be added to documents to indicate how they should be handled. A contract that’s labeled “Confidential,” for instance, makes it clear to the user that they should follow the proper security precautions when viewing the file, such as not leaving the screen open unattended or not sharing their screen with another participant on a video call. It also removes any ambiguity about the nature of the document.
Track Your Documents
While many free watermarking tools only allow users to add a generic logo or text to a document, dedicated viewing solutions like PrizmDoc Viewer can create watermarks that contain unique identifiers, making it easier to track documents throughout their lifecycle. This makes it easier to track down the source of a leak or breach if a file ends up somewhere unexpected. In addition to the security benefits, customized watermarks that include a user name, time stamp, or revision number helps organizations maintain better version control over their documents and avoid any confusion over which file is the most up-to-date.
Discourage Unauthorized Distribution
Watermarks are an easy way to indicate ownership of a document and its contents. While many files, and PDF files especially, are protected by some form of digital rights management (DRM) that limits who can open, edit, or copy them, this form of security is often circumvented by inventive tactics like taking a screenshot, capturing video footage, or even photographing a screen with an external device.
If the captured document has a watermark, it will be quite difficult for someone to distribute the file without revealing the owner. While it’s possible to remove a watermark without damaging the document contents, doing so can be a difficult and time-consuming process that often isn’t worth the effort. More importantly, if the watermark contains identifying information, it’s often possible to find out where a security breach occurred and then locate those responsible for it.
How to Watermark Documents
While many organizations understand the value of adding watermarks to their documents, they often don’t have the tools in place to do so effectively at scale. There are a number of free watermarking web applications available, but these sites typically require a file to be uploaded first, which creates a huge security risk for most businesses. In many cases, this process is also irreversible because it burns the watermark into the document itself.
Microsoft Word can easily add watermark text or images to a document, but they’re also quite easy to remove. In fact, a quick Google search points to multiple resources for removing Word-based watermarks from both DOCX and PDF files.
PrizmDoc Viewer supports multiple forms of document watermarks natively within an application, including identifying text, diagonal text, and images. More importantly, since the watermark is associated with the document viewing session, it isn’t applied to the source document itself, which remains secure within the main application. Watermark document properties can be specified to include more than one watermark in a viewing session, even supporting mixed types on different areas of the page.
Text Watermarks
The watermark API for PrizmDoc Viewer allows users to adjust the location, size, and style of the text. Information included can be adjusted based on document needs.
Diagonal Text Watermarks
PrizmDoc Viewer can apply a single directional text watermark across the center of the page. By including control characters in the text string, it’s possible to create line breaks in the text.
Image Watermarks
The watermark API can also add a transparent PNG file to the document, which is ideal for displaying a company logo. PrizmDoc Viewer can adjust the opacity of the watermark regardless of whether it’s an image or text.
By adding multiple watermarks, organizations can easily brand their files across the company while also providing effective tracking information for individual documents.
Start Watermarking Documents Today with PrizmDoc Viewer
A fully-featured HTML5 viewer, Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer is easily integrated into web applications in need of comprehensive viewing and document management capabilities. In addition to watermarking, it delivers conversion, OCR, annotation, and redaction support for more than 100 different file types. Get a hands-on view of how easily PrizmDoc Viewer can apply custom watermarks to your documents with our watermarking API demo.
On March 10, 2021, Accusoft announced the arrival of the free-to-use Accusoft PDF Viewer, the latest addition to its family of PDF solutions. An entirely client-side integration with no complicated server dependencies, this lightweight JavaScript PDF viewer also features a responsive UI for out-of-the-box mobile support.
“We’re excited to offer this free version of the Accusoft PDF Viewer to developers,” says Jack Berlin, CEO of Accusoft. “Our team worked hard to build a viewer that’s a step above what you can get from open source offerings. We think it’s going to solve a lot of the problems developers typically encounter with existing PDF libraries.”
Accusoft PDF Viewer integrates into an application quickly and easily with just a few snippets of code. It runs entirely within the browser to deliver an optimized viewing experience across all devices. The intuitive UI controls allow users to zoom, pan, jump to page, navigate thumbnails, and pinch-to-zoom on mobile screens with ease. And thanks to lightning fast full-text search, locating essential information is easier than ever.
“Accusoft PDF Viewer is great for developers because it allows them to maintain complete control over documents without having to set up any cumbersome server infrastructure,” says Mark Hansen, Product Manager. “Having a responsive UI that adapts to mobile displays will also increase their flexibility tremendously.”
The free version of Accusoft PDF Viewer allows developers to quickly add powerful viewing capabilities to their web applications. We’re currently working on additional features (such as annotation and eSignature) that will be included in an upgraded paid version.
To learn more about Accusoft PDF Viewer or download it for a first-hand look, please visit our website.
About Accusoft:
Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve their most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including OnTask, PrizmDoc™ Viewer, and ImageGear, are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version release, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com.