Also, assume that the forms are coming in to the organization via the mail room or FAX machines. The computer program that uses the data could be an application program, an electronic form or even a word processing document. There are two methods a person may use to read the data from a form in order to type it into a computer. The manual data entry consists of a person reading the form and keypunching the appropriate information into the computer. If a form is an electronic image it means that the paper form was scanned or faxed into the computer and is in a digitized form.
Software tools are available to translate image data into machine sensible format.
The success of these tools is extremely dependent upon the design of the forms. All OCR manufacturers agree that forms design is critical to the success of OCR translation. The accuracy rate of an OCR package is determined by the percentage of characters that it correctly translates. There are many design techniques that can be employed during forms design process to ensure the best possible accuracy. The first large scale application of business imaging was in the area of test scoring.