Technical FAQs

As speed and efficiency have become increasingly vital for business success, it’s hardly a surprise that organizations across many industries have turned to white labeling as a way of retaining their competitive edge. While white labeling can be found in every industry, it’s proved to be incredibly important in the technology sector, where many independent software vendors rely upon white label software to build better applications and solutions.

How Does White Labeling Work?

In many instances, organizations need to launch a product quickly and may not have expertise in some aspect of their business. A software developer that specializes in FinTech solutions for processing loan applications, for example, may have the machine learning tools to sift through documents quickly but lack the viewing and editing features that would allow users to collaborate securely and effectively.

White labeling is a process where one company purchases a product from another company and then rebrands it for their own use. For physical products, this usually means repackaging and reselling something, but with digital products, the rebranding typically involves customizing the user experience (UI) to incorporate it into an existing application. 

In the previous example, the FinTech developer might turn to a product like PrizmDoc Viewer to integrate secure viewing capabilities into their platform. Using PrizmDoc Viewer’s white label software features, the company could rebrand the UI with its own logo and terminology. The average user, then, would never know that some aspects of their FinTech solution incorporates products made by another software manufacturer.

4 Benefits of Using White Label Software

Companies of all sizes turn to white label solutions when building their applications. Here are some of the reasons why they they choose this option instead of building everything they need from scratch:

1. Rapid Deployment

One of the obvious advantages to adopting a white label software solution is the speed of deployment. Building new features within an application takes both time and developer resources. If everything needs to be coded and deployed from scratch, production timelines can quickly extend indefinitely. As deadlines are pushed back, developers may even be pulled away from working on more innovative software features to build basic functionality into their applications. This vicious cycle makes it bring a product to market in time to capitalize on opportunities.

With easy-to-integrate white label software, companies can rapidly integrate the functionality they need into their applications and dedicate more resources to the novel features that will set them apart in a crowded marketplace. The ability to deploy core capabilities quickly means that teams can get to a minimum viable product faster and bring their software to market. Since white labeling allows them to rebrand and customize their integration to match the rest of the application interface, end users still enjoy a seamless experience.

2. Proven Functionality

When production deadlines are tight, it usually doesn’t make sense to have developers spending their time building a solution that already exists as a ready-made integration. Although open-source tools can be quite attractive, they don’t always provide the robust features expected of modern applications. In many cases, development teams have to spend valuable time building upon open-source solutions just to get them to work properly within an application framework.

White label software provides proven functionality right out of the box, allowing developers to quickly integrate the features they need and get back to working on other priorities. They also offer a more specialized approach to application needs. Rather than trying to build something new or adapt a similar solution, developers can select the exact features they need, implement them, and know that they’ll work as promised. Since they’re supported products, white label software also provides more peace of mind when it comes to updates and patching vulnerabilities. 

3. Budget Friendly

Developing new software features is an expensive undertaking. It requires companies to hire developers with the right expertise, dedicate hardware and processing capabilities, and multiple rounds of testing just to get to a viable state, but the costs don’t stop there. Once new functionality is built, it will require ongoing maintenance and support to ensure that it continues to work as intended and stays secure against potential threats. Those additional costs can quickly become burdensome for a software company that simply wants to incorporate common features into their application.

With white label software, companies can have all the benefits of third party support without compromising their user experience. White label API solutions integrate seamlessly into an application and the company can turn to the vendor for support when something goes wrong or when new features are needed. Eliminating ongoing maintenance from the budget means that teams can spend more of their resources on delivering a better overall product to their customers. 

4. Flexible Scalability

Software applications often change significantly throughout their lifecycle. What begins as a small program with only a few features can scale very quickly into an enterprise-grade workhorse that must meet the needs of multiple departments. Having a solution in place that can grow and change along with business needs is vital for organizations looking to retain their flexibility.

Customizable white label software makes it easy for companies to grow their applications along with their business. They can begin with a modest feature set and then implement additional tools as needed as user needs change over time. This versatility also frees up developers to build innovative solutions that may require features that are not being used in an existing application, but could easily be enabled when the time comes. Having flexible, scalable white-label technology built into a platform early on opens up a wide range of possibilities for future development.

The Behind-the-Scenes Ingredient to Your Application’s Success

As a software manufacturer specializing in API technologies for document processing, conversion, and automation, Accusoft has spent many years building solutions that work “under the hood” to enhance our customers’ applications. That’s why the PrizmDoc Suite of products incorporates white label software features to help them blend seamlessly into your existing platform. Whether you’re looking to add new capabilities or need to incorporate functionality quickly to get your products to market faster, our flexible integrations can help solve your document management challenges on your terms. Talk to our team today to find out which solution is right for you.

FinTech adoption continues to accelerate. According to Wealth Professional, almost 40 percent of finance firms now prioritize the adoption of FinTech frameworks, even as new-to-market startups disrupt the status quo. 

However, spending alone isn’t enough to deliver streamlined and scalable FinTech processes. As noted by David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte in a recent protocol piece, firms now face the challenge of creating “high-quality, repeatable data processes with the profusion of systems involved in generating data” while simultaneously integrating unstructured and semi-structured data sources into existing processes.

At the front lines of this fundamental framework change is digital documents and business process workflows. Let’s dive in, and look at some of the biggest frustrations facing the finance industry, the solutions they need to streamline digital processes, and how Accusoft’s ImageGear can help redefine digital document delivery.

FinTech Framework Challenges

By leveraging data-driven techniques and digital-first processes, Forbes notes that it’s possible for even startup firms to differentiate their service delivery and compete with huge financial brands — but only when digital document processes align with on-demand performance expectations. 

Consider common use cases such as loan origination, credit applications, or mortgage approvals. Many FinTech firms now target client pre-approval within 24 hours rather than the days or weeks required by traditional finance corporations. The problem? As digital document processes naturally scale, so does complexity, creating a practical paradox around three key challenges:

• Speed — As noted above, many FinTech firms are looking to disrupt incumbent efforts by reducing approval times and increasing customer satisfaction. As the number and type of digital documents required for timely approval expands, disparate processes conspire to stifle speed. Consider a loan origination requiring identity verification, income confirmation, and current debt load documents for pre-approval, all of which are in different file formats, forcing firms to use multiple software solutions and slowing their progress.
• Security — Cybersecurity and compliance are critical for FinTech firms to succeed, but both requirements come with rapid scaling complexity. For example, a recent FDIC document lists more than 200 types of Compliance Information and Document Request (CIDR) forms which must be customized for each financial use case. The result? Increased document processing volumes drives increased complexity and opens potential security gaps.
• Consistency — Digital data consistency is critical to ensure accurate approvals and assess potential risks, but contrasting document processes create the ideal environment for human error. Despite best efforts on the part of employees, the more manual processes introduced into FinTech functions, the greater the chance of misplaced assets or data conversion mistakes.

Streamlined Structure Solutions

To bridge the gap between FinTech potential and fast-track document processes, companies need solutions that deliver four broad benefits:

• Document Conversion — FinTech firms now face a diverse range of documents that often frustrate efforts to unify key data. Here, integrated conversion functionality is critical to ensure employees have the tools they need to quickly convert key documents without having to open multiple applications and manually move or manipulate data.
• On-Demand Annotation — Speaking of data, it’s also essential for staff to collaborate on key documents, especially as many FinTech firms embrace the remote work revolution. Advanced annotation tools that allow asynchronous collaboration are essential to ensure employees always have access to the most current document version and administrators can easily determine who edited documents, when, and why.
• Digital Compression — As digital documents become the de facto financial standard, storage space is at a premium. This is especially problematic for larger document types such as PDFs, which are often preferred by FinTech firms for the ability to easily control access, editing rights, and collaboration. Uncompressed, these PDFs can quickly overwhelm even enterprise storage systems, forcing companies to either spend more on cloud services or invest in bigger datacenters. Reducing PDF size both saves space and helps companies streamline document sharing.
• PDF Manipulation — While read-only access makes PDFs ideal for FinTech firms that need to share specific information without introducing security risk, adjusting and editing these documents in-house often requires multiple applications and increased employee effort. Even more worrisome? Staff encountering functional limits may opt for free, online applications that could compromise document confidentiality.

Practical Process Performance

ImageGear is designed to help FinTech firms both overcome current frustrations and help future-proof financial frameworks by combining disparate document functions into a single-source application and improve overall performance. Standout features include:

• Complete PDF Control — ImageGear provides a single-platform solution for PDF manipulation and control. Developers can easily integrate an SDK that enables application users to create, edit, view, and print PDFs from within the confines of existing applications, create searchable PDF documents, or flatten acroforms to remove file interactivity, all while automatically conforming to the PDF language standard.
• Secure Signature Verification — Secure digital signatures now form a critical component of on-demand FinTech forms processing. If companies can’t accept and verify client signatures, they’re not able to deliver speedy approvals and meet evolving consumer expectations. ImageGear allows companies to ensure that electronic documents are authentic. It uses encryption to verify that the information  has not been altered and is coming from a trusted source.
• Agile Annotations — Making changes to PDF files is easy with ImageGear. Staff can quickly add text, lines, hot spots, encryption, rich text, images, or even audio as needed to ensure documents are complete, accurate, and ready for approval.
• Comprehensive Conversion Options — To deliver on the promise of FinTech performance, firms must be able to quickly and easily convert and combine multiple file types into a single PDF and convert PDFs as necessary into other file formats. ImageGear empowers developers to integrate a way for application users to quickly convert documents to PDF, create PDF/A files from raster images, and convert scanned pages into PDF searchable text using advanced optical character recognition (OCR). Annotations marks can also be converted as needed into XML files for enhanced auditability.
• Substantial File Size Reduction — ImageGear enables file compression of up to 45 percent to save valuable storage space and utilizes automatic analysis to determine optimal compression operations for best-fit results.

Ready to embrace the future of FinTech and redefine digital document delivery at scale? Start your free trial of ImageGear today!

Document image cleanup is a vital step in building an efficient and accurate processing workflow. In a perfect world, every file an organization receives would be in pristine, high-resolution condition so it could be processed quickly and easily. Unfortunately, the reality is that documents come in all sizes, conditions, and formats. Companies can receive vital information in the form of email, traditional mail, fax, or even text. Documents scanned into a crooked, low-resolution file are just as likely to be received alongside digital versions submitted entirely through a web application.

This poses a significant challenge for software developers building the next generation of automation solutions. Without some way of cleaning up document images, companies that still rely upon manual processes will struggle to read and process files. More importantly, poor image quality interferes with optical character recognition (OCR) engine accuracy, making more human interaction necessary to verify recognition results. By integrating document image cleanup tools into their applications, developers can enhance the speed and accuracy of their automated processes and help their customers leverage the full potential of digital transformation.

7 Essential Document Image Cleanup Features Your Application Needs

There are a few essential document image cleanup tools that should be considered absolutely essential for any application that has to manage multiple file formats. To see these tools in action and understand why they’re so vital, let’s take a look at how these features work in ImageGear, Accusoft’s powerful document and image processing SDK integration.

1. Despeckling

Speckles can appear on document images for a variety of reasons. In some cases, they are unwanted image noise created during the original scanning process (the classic “salt and pepper” noise), but in other instances, they’re simply the result of dust particles on the surface of a scanned document or on the scanner itself. They are frequently encountered when converting old documents into digital form. Speckling not only interferes with OCR engine performance, but can also make it difficult to maintain image fidelity when compressing or converting files. 

ImageGear can reduce or eliminate speckling as part of the document image cleanup process. There are two ways to approach speckle removal:

• Despeckle Method: This function removes color noise from 1-bit images by taking the average color value in a square area around the speckle and replacing its pixels with that value.
• GeomDespeckle Method: This function uses the Crimmins algorithm to send the image through a geometric filter, reducing the undesired noise while preserving edges of the original image. This process is applied only to 8-bit grayscale images.

2. Image Inversion

With so many documents being scanned, converted, and transferred between applications, there’s a greater likelihood of something going wrong along the way. One of the most frequent problems is image inversion, which swaps pixel colors and turns a standard white background with black text into a black background with white text. This mix-up can render documents completely unreadable by OCR engines.

ImageGear can be configured to automatically recognize when image inversion is necessary. The invert method can also be used to immediately change the color of each pixel contained in the entire image, turning white to black and black to white.

3. Deskewing

Skewed document images are both cumbersome to manage and challenging for OCR engines to read accurately. Unfortunately, manually scanned documents are often uneven, and the problem is only becoming worse now that many people are using their phone cameras as makeshift document scanners. That’s why the first step in the document image cleanup process is often deskewing, which rotates and aligns the images to enhance recognition accuracy.

The deskewing process often involves more than just rotating a document, especially where images taken by a digital camera are concerned. ImageGear’s 3D deskew feature corrects for perception distortion, which can occur whenever a document is scanned by a handheld camera, using a sophisticated algorithm.

4. Blank Page Detection

Many documents converted into digital format contain information on both sides. If they are fed into a scanner along with single page documents, the resulting file will contain multiple blank pages. This might not seem like much of a problem, but if there is enough speckling or noise around the edge of the image, an application may try to apply an OCR engine to it and generate an error result. Blank page detection can quickly identify any image that is blank or mostly white and flag it for deletion.

5. Line Removal

Although they may not seem very troublesome at first glance, lines can create a number of problems for OCR engines. When lines and printed text overlap, it can be difficult for the engine to distinguish between the two. In some instances, the engine may even misread a line as a letter or number. Removing lines from a document prior to OCR reading ensures that the remaining text will be recognized more quickly and analyzed more accurately.

ImageGear supports both solid line removal and dotted line removal. The first method automatically detects and removes any horizontal and vertical lines contained in the document (like frames or tables), while the second method determines which dotted lines to remove by measuring the number and diameter of dots.

6. Border Removal

When scanned documents don’t align properly with the boundaries of the scanner or were copied onto paper that was larger than the original image at some point, the remaining space is often filled in with black. These borders are not only unsightly, but they also interfere with other document image cleanup processes. Although they can usually be cropped out easily, the cropping process alters the proportions of the image, which could create more problems later.

Removing these large black regions is easy with ImageGear’s CleanBorders option. It focuses on the areas near the edge of the page, which typically should not contain any important image data. 

7. Remove Hole Punches

Important documents were often stored in binders before they were prepared for digitization. When scanned, the blank space from the hole punch leaves a large, black dot along the edge of the document. Unfortunately, these holes sometimes overlap with text or could be picked up as filled-in bubbles by an optical mark recognition (OMR) engine.

ImageGear can identify and remove punch holes created by common hole punchers, including two, three, and five hole configurations. The RemovePunchHoles method can be adjusted to account for differing hold diameters in addition to different locations.

Unlock Your Application’s Document Image Cleanup Potential with ImageGear

Although ImageGear can perform a variety of document handling functions such as viewing, conversion, annotation, compression, and OCR processing, its document image cleanup capabilities help applications overcome key content management challenges and enhance performance in other areas. Improved document image quality allows data to be extracted more quickly, enhances the viewing experience, and reduces complications when it comes to file compression and conversion.

Learn more about the ImageGear collection of SDKs to discover how they can deliver versatile document and image processing to your applications.

Spreadsheets are to finance what cranes are to construction. As a result, financial services organizations including traditional banks, tax companies, insurance agencies, and fintech firms opt for software-driven spreadsheet solutions as standard operating procedures. The problem? Ubiquitous spreadsheet software introduces a host of cybersecurity, compliance, and collaboration challenges, especially as regulatory and operational requirements evolve around the use, storage, and sharing of clients’ financial data.  Enter PrizmDoc Cells for finance. 

Accusoft’s newest addition to the PrizmDoc Suite — PrizmDoc Cells — offers both form(ula) and functional advantages for financial data entry and integrity.

Managing Market Forces

As noted by Forbes, the finance market is changing. Recent survey data found that 69 percent pointed to fintech firms as a “lifeline” during the current crisis. And these shifts are ongoing. Even once pandemic pressures begin to ease, there’s no going back from the speed and convenience offered to users when brick-and-mortar locations were locked down. 

Financial firms across multiple markets that made the move online application processing, claims evaluation, and loan approvals must now support these initiatives at scale — but many are now finding themselves frustrated by the limitations of current spreadsheet solutions.

Addressing Operational Challenges

Familiar spreadsheet software offers straightforward function: Staff can enter relevant data and derive actionable output through formulas. But these tools also pose problems for finance firms, including:

• • Operational errors — As noted by CFO, 88 percent of spreadsheets contain some type of error. These include errors in formulas, human data entry issues that create impossible data ranges, and even hidden fonts that can impact the outcome of calculations. This is no small issue — for one financial firm, a missing negative sign caused a 2.6 billion dollar mistake in reporting net capital losses, forcing the company to cancel year-end dividend distributions.

• • Version consistency — The more people handle and modify a spreadsheet, the harder it is to identify the “right” version. This becomes especially problematic as spreadsheets are saved to desktops or mobile devices, then modified and sent back into corporate email environments.

• • Data security — While email presents a significant spreadsheet security risk, the same is true of any solution — cloud-based, on-premises or a mix of both — that allows users to download, copy, and share spreadsheets. Consider the case of a well-meaning user who downloads a financial spreadsheet from a cloud app and then sends it to his personal email so he can work on them remotely. If this email account is compromised, so too are any supposedly secure spreadsheets, putting financial firms at risk of regulatory compromise.

• • Ongoing Time and effort — From the time needed to track down and verify the most recent and accurate version of key spreadsheets to the effort required if data is entered incorrectly and requires remediation, current software tools often see staff focused on putting out formula and framework fires instead of moving financial firms forward.

Gaining Control with PrizmDoc Cells for Finance

PrizmDoc Cells changes the spreadsheet paradigm by shifting data out of proprietary software and into the application of your choice. As a web-based spreadsheet viewer and editor designed to natively support XLSX files, PrizmDoc Cells provides the ability to securely embed spreadsheet data into any website, intranet, portal or CMS application without compromising security. This makes it possible for independent software vendors (ISVs) and other fintech providers to deliver the best of both worlds: Familiar functions in a user-friendly, online form that’s separated from the critical formulas and proprietary business logic behind-the-scenes.

Key benefits of PrizmDoc Cells for finance include:

• Solve for proprietary dependencies — Excel remains the de facto spreadsheet standard for many organizations but also locks financial firms into a cycle of software dependency — and if legacy applications or in-house tools don’t work well with Excel, firms face extra operational steps to ensure reliable data access. PrizmDoc Cells solves this proprietary problem by allowing any application to import, edit, and export XLSX files without Excel dependencies.

• Safeguard source data — In many cases, end-users need to view spreadsheets and make minor edits but can’t be granted access to original files. With PrizmDoc Cells, fintech providers can secure intellectual property by removing end-user access to proprietary source files, encrypting the data, and hosting it securely in their own environments.

• Separate underlying logic and UI — While proprietary business logic, formulas, and calculations form the basis of spreadsheet value and actionable insight, users don’t need the ability to see — or modify — these functions. PrizmDoc Cells lets administrators control what’s visible, what’s accessible, and what’s changeable to ensure spreadsheet consistency.

• Streamline version control — By removing the need for client-side software installs and downloads, PrizmDoc Cells sets the stage for enhanced version control. While users can view and edit spreadsheets with the right permissions, these spreadsheets are continually updated with the most recent changes to ensure version consistency. 

• Start ASAP — PrizmDoc Cells makes it easy for companies to get started and get building their best-fit spreadsheet solution by using the simplicity and speed of Docker containers. Instead of worrying about potential conflicts with other software or issues with specific operating system requirements, companies can start up a PrizmDoc Cells container in a matter of seconds.

Securely Embed Your Data Now

Even as the value proposition evolves, the volume of spreadsheets processed by financial firms continues to grow. For industry operators, this presents a challenge: How do they align evolving client expectations with current spreadsheet limitations? 

For ISVs, this offers an opportunity. Empowered by PrizmDoc Cells, vendors can offer a new take on spreadsheet form and function that delivers ease of integration and on-demand customization without breaking the bank — or increasing regulatory risk.

Unlock the PrizmDoc Cells potential — try the online demo today and experience the future of formula and function.

The legal profession may not be the first sector that comes to mind when thinking about how technology is transforming the way organizations conduct business, but LegalTech is quickly becoming an essential component of practicing law. Innovative digital platforms are helping legal firms to improve efficiency and solve problems, even though choosing and implementing these solutions isn’t always an easy process.

Despite the clear benefits of legal technology, status quo bias and concerns about onboarding difficulties have combined to make many organizations hesitant to invest in these tools. The concerns are understandable given that each new solution has the potential to disrupt established processes and ways of doing business. Today’s legal clients, however, expect firms to be more responsive to their needs and move quickly to advocate for their cases. Forward-thinking legal organizations  recognize that LegalTech isn’t so much a “necessary evil” as an outright necessity to business success.

Obstacles Facing LegalTech Adoption

As the legal industry becomes more competitive, firms are under intense pressure to do more with less while also improving their administrative agility. While there are many technology solutions available to facilitate this digital transformation, the implementation process often presents a series of obstacles. The sheer number of LegalTech solutions to choose from, whether in terms of software applications and platforms or devices and locations, can be overwhelming, especially when it comes time to integrate into a coherent IT strategy.

Lawyers routinely need to switch between different platforms and systems, some of which don’t communicate with each other. A key tool in one application may not exist in another, and in many cases data can’t be transferred between them easily. The constant juggling not only disrupts workflows and impacts efficiency, but also introduces abundant opportunities for human error to creep into processes. These risks combine to make many legal organizations resistant to adopting and learning new legal technologies, and instead drive them to rely upon outdated practices and systems.

Law firms have also been forced to adapt the way they operate due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, essential tasks like meeting face-to-face with clients, conducting records research during discovery, and consulting with fellow attorneys are much more complicated. With many law offices shifting to a remote environment, legal professionals  find themselves switching between work laptops and personal devices frequently while also trying to access their firm’s intranet securely from off-site locations. All of these factors combine to reduce remote productivity since lawyers aren’t able to access the full range of their legal resources from their current location or device to create a single, cohesive workflow.

LegalTech and API Integrations

Despite the obstacles posed by adopting new tools and platforms, legal firms simply can’t afford to ignore digital transformation trends. By investing in innovative new legal technology, organizations can demonstrate their commitment to long-term growth and providing a better customer experience. Law clients understand that automation and other smart technologies can help them save money and receive better, more personalized service. In order to be successful in this environment, firms need to adopt a competitive growth strategy that is complemented by investments in technology.

Fortunately, many of the technology challenges facing legal organizations can be solved through API integrations. Short for application programming interface, APIs are an essential feature of today’s IT deployments that allow companies to get the most out of their disparate systems and applications.

How API Integration Works

At a very simple level, an API consists of code that allows two separate technology systems to communicate and interact with one another. It functions a bit like a translator and messenger, delivering user requests and data from one system to a completely separate system. This effectively allows an application to utilize the features and data of other applications without having to build out that functionality from scratch.

For example, the Uber ride-sharing app connects customers to available drivers within a specific area. It does this with a combination of smartphone geolocation and accurate maps, but the Uber app doesn’t actually have its own mapping capabilities. To get those features, it connects to Google Maps by way of an API that allows it to access the relevant navigational data and use it to connect customers to drivers.

Another key function of APIs is their ability to automate key processes and connect legacy infrastructure to newer technology systems. Data can be collected in one system, for instance, and “pushed” into another automatically. This not only eliminates the complicated (and error prone) task of manually transferring data between different systems, but also allows users to build a workflow in an application they’re already accustomed to without having to learn an entirely new system. 

More importantly, since APIs allow newer technologies, devices, and legacy applications to talk to each other, they provide firms with substantial flexibility when it comes to adding new platforms. Purchasing new software doesn’t mean throwing out existing tools, which substantially reduces the risks associated with technology investments and upgrades.

Stay Tuned for More

API integration and interoperability can deliver tremendous benefits to legal workflows and help firms better serve their clients. Stay tuned for part 2 of this series to learn how Accusoft’s API capabilities can unlock the full potential of your applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic may not be the first pandemic to impact global supply chains, but its impact has been orders of magnitude greater than previous public health crises. Businesses around the world have been forced to contend with the twin challenges of transitioning to a remote workforce and overcoming severe supply chain disruption. As 2020 winds down to a close, it’s becoming clear that the pandemic may well represent a “new normal” for logistics strategy rather than a temporary situation.

3 Critical Supply Chain Challenges 

From implementing new technology to establishing relationships with alternative vendors, organizations across multiple industries are taking steps to meet the challenges confronting their supply chains in both the immediate and long-term future. One of the biggest areas of focus is barcode integration. Although they may not seem like they belong at the forefront of innovation, barcodes are scanned more than six billion times every day and serve an incredibly important role in modern supply chain management.

Here are a few of the biggest challenges organizations are facing:

1. Supply Chain Visibility

Speed and flexibility are competitive advantages in today’s on-demand marketplace. Customers want products delivered faster and will quickly lose faith in brands that fail to meet their expectations. According to a 2019 survey of online consumers, 72.7% of respondents were unlikely to order from a company again after a poor delivery experience. Given those high stakes, it’s incredibly important for organizations to maintain high levels of visibility into their supply chains.

Barcode technology makes it possible to track products and materials throughout the entire production and distribution process. A quick scan is all that’s needed to update an item’s status every time it’s processed at a location. That information feeds into inventory tracking software that allows businesses to get a more accurate picture of how shipments move through their supply chain. This visibility makes it easier to identify potential problems and enhance overall logistics efficiency. 

2. Digital Transformation

Despite the growing emphasis on digital transformation across the economy, the average supply chain is still held back with inefficient, legacy infrastructure. Small and medium-size businesses face the greatest challenges, with only 21% of them using digital tools to integrate their supply chain operations with other departments. In the retail industry alone, bad processes and data disconnects cost companies over $500 billion annually. As the holiday season draws nearer and promises to bring with it a massive increase in online shopping, having a fully digital supply chain in place with enough speed to handle that demand is essential.

Implementing the right digital technology tools can help organizations to streamline their supply chains and gather the data they need to make better decisions. Barcode integration software is a foundational component of this transformation because it forms a bridge between the physical and digital elements of logistics management. Shipments can be instantly scanned into tracking systems to provide a wealth of data points across the supply chain, making it easier to adapt to disruptions and develop better processes. Barcode libraries also need to be able to scan and decode both traditional 1D codes and newer 2D codes quickly and accurately to keep products moving swiftly and smoothly to consumers.

3. Automation

As many organizations have put social distancing protocols in place during the pandemic to protect the health of both employees and customers, automation has become more important to supply chain performance than ever before. These COVID-19 pressures are sure to accelerate what was already a growing push toward implementing automated software and systems. Gartner even projected in 2019 that 30% of warehouse workers will be replaced by collaborative robots by 2023, which will further drive the demand for automated scanning and inventory management tools to accompany them.

For these automated systems to work effectively, they will need robust software that can withstand the difficult working conditions of warehouses, assembly lines, and distribution centers. A barcode integration that struggles to accurately read damaged or broken barcode images, for instance, won’t last very long in such an environment. The software powering automated systems must be able to function under a variety of conditions and be adaptable enough to overcome obstacles without constant oversight from on-site workers.

Unleash Your Supply Chain With Barcode Xpress

Building software capable of meeting the needs of a truly digital supply chain is no easy task. That’s especially true when it comes to integrating barcode reading capabilities into supply chain applications. With so many barcode formats in use, developers need an SDK with the ability to accurately detect, read, and write both common and uncommon barcode types used across all industries.

Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress is a multi-language barcode integration capable of reading and writing more than 30 different barcode types quickly and accurately. A truly robust SDK solution, Barcode Xpress leverages the imaging functionalities of ImagXpress to repair damaged orbroken barcodes that other readers are unable to read.

Speed

Barcode Xpress is capable of detecting and decoding multiple barcodes on a page at speeds of up to 1,000 pages per minute. It doesn’t matter where the barcode is located, what type of code it is, or how many are present. The control is able to read them regardless of orientation within milliseconds.

Accuracy

Every time Barcode Xpress detects a barcode, it not only provides the information encoded within the image, but also reports a confidence value to ensure high levels of accuracy. Damaged, broken, or poorly printed barcodes can also be scanned thanks to the SDK’s image processing capabilities. Black noise, white noise, erasures, low resolution, white line streaks, and other common barcode problems are reconstructed and scanned automatically to keep the supply chain moving.

Versatility

With the ability to detect, read, and write over 30 different barcode types, Barcode Xpress is available in multiple configurations for Windows and Linux-based operating systems. The SDK library supports 24-bit color images, 8-bit grayscale images, and 1-bit black and white images, as well as providing more than 80 additional image processing and editing functions thanks to its ImagXpress integration.

Experience Barcode Xpress Today

Easy to deploy and utilize, Barcode Xpress is a true all-in-one solution for desktop and web applications seeking barcode recognition capabilities. Just a few lines of code is all it takes to unlock the full potential of your supply chain technology.

Find out just how simple barcode integration can be with Barcode Xpress. Sign up today to download a free trial or talk to one of our SDK specialists today to learn more.