Some companies, for example, in the medical and legal sectors, handle the intake of numerous documents daily. The information they contain is the fuel that drives the work engine throughout the day. This information arrives in or transitions to a digital format via scanning. Contracts, technical documents, invoices and other documents are all examples of this. You can evaluate how well these capture processes work with the Quality Assessment Service from the Tungsten Marketplace.

Scan quality can have a considerable impact on downstream processes. By using this ready-made solution that integrates with Tungsten Capture, you can adopt a tool for accountability. Short- and long-term improvements are possible with the intelligence you gather while utilizing this solution. What makes it so valuable? Consider the significant issues surrounding scans today and what more data can do.

Common Challenges Surrounding Scanned Documents Today

Offices that process many scanned documents need that data to arrive in high quality. However, many issues can occur during the initial creation of the scan that instead degrade quality. These issues can include:

• A broad range of device types spanning multiple manufacturers or even product generations. One location may not have scanners that all conform to the same standards, which can lead to quality differences.
• Insufficient lighting from the scan element or too much light reaching the scan sensors.
• Hardware that doesn’t operate properly or is configured to produce images of the necessary scan quality.
• Improper operation of the scanner itself.

These issues can create problems with the final scan, such as a low DPI setting and noisy images. Poor-quality scans complicate optical character recognition even with advanced solutions, which often means more time spent correcting and validating OCR results. With the Quality Assessment Service, you can pinpoint where these issues originate.

Why Make the Effort to Track Scan Quality to the Source?

The occasional noisy image or subpar OCR output usually isn’t an issue. A validation operator keeps the human touch in the loop and helps correct such problems. However, crucial turnaround times become longer when an operator needs to make many edits to a document or has a high work volume. Slowdowns at this early stage inevitably create delays further downstream.

Usually, you’ll know how many times an operator had to edit a document, but not necessarily its origin. That leaves you with little recourse for solving poor scan quality, which impacts the outcome of document automation. With the opportunity to identify specific sources that produce problematic data, team leaders can zero in on issues and develop an effective solution.

How the Quality Assessment Service Works

With Tungsten Capture, organizations can track some metrics about the validation workflow. Specifically, Capture tracks the number of edits made by the operator to each document. This metric helps assess the overall efficiency of your document ingestion process and tracking operator performance. However, as noted, this metric can’t help you identify where problematic scans originate and why.

The Quality Assessment Service adds functionality to the Transformation for Validation and the AP Essentials Verify module. This extension can provide the needed insight. With this solution, it is possible to evaluate the quality of a scanned document. There are several criteria to choose from:

• The dots per inch (DPI) in the image
• The amount of noise in the image
• The accuracy of the OCR outcomes

Organizations may also develop custom modules to extend the evaluation criteria further. The service collects the rating and classification of each document scan and maintains a record of its point of origin. With enough data, this can provide you with a significant window into which scanners or office teams send through poor-quality data.

The Benefits of Deploying This Simple Solution

The knowledge gained from this simple statistic collection process is central to ensuring your business is as efficient as possible. Once you can see where problematic scans originate, taking corrective action becomes much more straightforward. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” This simple service opens the door to knowing more about how your teams work.

Ensuring that all scans are of the highest quality creates overall improvements. Validation operators spend less time correcting incoming documents, giving them more time to focus on other work. Downstream processes receive accurate data, and teams spend less time reconciling errors in data entry. Avoid bottlenecks at the earliest stages of the process to streamline the entire workflow.

Tips for Improving Scan Quality After Problem Identification

Based on the information you uncover using this service, managers can direct their attention to exploring why particular scanners seem to issue poor-quality images. There may be several reasons at play. Some of the corrective actions a business may need to take could include:

• Cleaning dirty scanner hardware
• Replacing or repairing old, out-of-date, or malfunctioning hardware
• Adjusting scanner settings or upgrading old firmware
• Retraining scanner operators on the proper settings and procedures to use

Simple steps can save the business time and money while improving experiences for team members by reducing time-consuming validation and error correction.

Take Steps Towards Better Scans and Quality Data Today

You can’t fix problems you aren’t aware of—but better data highlights areas where you can improve your processes. Poor scan quality can complicate work, create frustration, cause delays and introduce troublesome errors in mission-critical data. You can’t track down the problems plaguing your workflows without a clear sense of where and when those scans originate.

A simple integration to Capture changes the game. As we’ve seen, the Quality Assessment Service by Logstream provides a simple and intuitive way to classify and track scan quality. Built-in notes for validation operators can help flag particular issues, such as poor OCR performance. Start building a framework for identifying problematic scans and correcting them today. Find out more and learn about other solutions in the Tungsten Marketplace today.