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How Businesses Can Organize Document Data to Maximize Its Value

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Enterprises leverage an abundance of documents in their operations, record-keeping, and analysis activities. From customer forms, to agreements, purchasing data, and internal reports, companies generate a lot of documentation. With companies generating so many pieces of documentation, it can be difficult for humans to derive information from the masses. Companies have to structure these documents and their contents into formats that provide the desired online viewing functionalities and data capture.

For this reason, enterprises leverage document processing and imaging software to allow document contents to be searched, edited, and annotated in web applications. These solutions provide intuitive viewing and collaboration functionality in content management systems, while also structuring data from documents into a format that can be used in analyses.

Processing Documents

Imaging solutions produce digital copies of hardcopy documents. Digitizing these documents allows them to be further viewed and edited. Optical character recognition then generates computer-recognizable records of their content. This allows the contents to be searched and for instances of text to be tagged and categorized as variables in quantitative analysis. Document imaging also allows businesses to produce forms with interactive fields that can be completed online. Data entered into these fields will already exist in digital form as strings of text, where it can be organized into records for datasets.

Accessing Content

Intuitive content management systems with collaborative access provide internal teams a means to reference data sources (the documents) and how information is organized in them. It is important for businesses to leverage these intuitive viewing and collaborative functionalities so individuals can easily locate needed information.

The viewing functionalities enabled by software like PrizmDoc Viewer allows firms to determine what information and fields should be included in the datasets they create and subsequently feed into an ERP system for reporting and analysis. These systems provide modules to report, track, and analyze data structured from documents and other sources in one central tool. The ease in viewing, annotating, and comparing documents through PrizmDoc Viewer adds to the ability to communicate reporting needs and database construction for the ERP system.

Keeping Records and Generating Insights

Businesses organize information from fields or text-based instances into tabular databases for easier record-keeping. For example, a company in the medical field may need to pull a patient’s name, birthdate, insurance, and visit details from documents completed by staff for digital record keeping or presentation to the patient. Storing document data in this format also enables it to be queried for statistical analysis. A financial services firm may want to record data from past transaction-related documents so it can run tests to determine the probability of closing certain types of deals, as well as forecast expected earnings.

To complete these data captures, Accusoft suites and SDKs can digitize hard copy documents into their underlying structured data. This software can also detect fields in digital forms that automatically extract the text entered on their behalf. Using these tools, businesses organize documents into content management systems and structure data for analysis and reporting.

Guest Blogger: Michael Johns, Content Specialist, Leading Computer Technology Corporation

Michael Johns is a marketing and content specialist working in the technology industry. With an interest in data, he has an appreciation for software solutions that help structure information and facilitate valuable analysis in creating better products and services.