We all know the potential benefits of a paperless office: it would make our business more efficient, we would not lose any data, we could analyse better the information that we collect, clear the shelves from excess filing, and maybe even reduce the costs of our office space. Moreover, we would boost our eco credentials.

But can we really work without paper?

For long paper has been an integral part of how a business functions and communicates. Filling an insurance claim form, submitting a tax return, receiving a shipping document with your parcel, or even collecting feedback forms from your restaurant or hotel, are a few examples of how paper forms, mostly handwritten, still prevail over electronic format.

Such forms need to be carefully analysed and sorted, recorded into our computer system and stored for future reference. This processing of forms can lead to errors during the keying in or filing process. Also, the valuable data gathered in these forms is dormant – if captured and analysed, this data could be priceless.

In order to be practical, we can reduce the volumes of paper that we generate, but we cannot work paperless, at least for the time being. The tasks to process paper can be quite challenging but with the right tools we can make our life easier. Abbyy is a global software company developing document capture and language-based technologies that integrate across the information lifecycle, starting from document scanning and text recognition to data analysis and knowledge extraction. Abbyy’s innovative solutions help customers optimise their business processes and action information by transforming it into accessible and useful knowledge. Abbyy products offer highly accurate and scalable document imaging and data extraction solutions that automatically transform documents of any structure, language or content into usable and accessible business-ready data. Intelligent self-learning classification and state-of-the-art recognition technologies enable Abbyy products, such as FlexiCapture, to replace error-prone manual processes with automatic document classification and processing. Flexible and customisable, FlexiCapture can handle virtually all document processing and can be tailored to any company’s workflows and regulations.

SG Solutions is the Abbyy partner for Malta. For more information visit www.sgsolutions.com.mt or call on 2144 2123.

Neville Lia, senior software specialist at SG Solutions.