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Data Digitization: Harnessing digital solutions to make data readily available

May 9, 2022

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Data offers businesses a much-needed edge over competitors. A large amount of data is hidden among piles of documents waiting to be extracted for making game-changing decisions. RPA has helped organizations transform digitally and enhance process efficiencies by automating repetitive manual tasks. Unfortunately, businesses hit a roadblock with non-digital data in documents such as invoices, scanned paper forms, statements, claims, and receipts.

How can organizations extract insights, especially from data that is locked away in scanned documents? This is where data digitization comes to the rescue.

Introduction to data digitization

Digitization is the process of turning analog information – such as images, written text, etc, into digital signals/components. Digitization is when data is turned into digital formats such as digital images, signals or rather into the binary. This is done to help process data digitally. It helps enable computer processing and helps carry out complex digital processes efficiently. Digitization is turning analog information into a numerical or binary format.

Digitization improves the very scope of digital processing and its transmission as it helps carry out processes much more efficiently in half the time. It helps data to be accessed by multiple points without any loss and to be converted into the desired formats.

Digital data can also be stored much more easily. Tons of paper data can be compressed into simple files with the help of digitization helping it to be preserved and functional for a long period of time.

What is data digitization, and how does it help businesses?

Whether big or small, every organization has to deal with bulk documents daily. Each of these documents is a gold mine of valuable company insights. However, most documents are non-digitized; hence, Extracting Data requires manual effort to scan and enter inputs into the enterprise IT system. Digitization helps businesses to take a leap forward by taking away paper processing and instead, enabling automation. Digitized data is not only faster but also increases transparency within the organization.

By using something like XtractEdge, businesses can provide specific solutions as per their client requirements and provide a packaged solution which is in tune with the customer’s needs. A tool like this would increase business value by making documents from the organization ready for integration, processing, and eventually consumption.

How does the Data digitization solution work?

Digitization of data seems like the best bet for businesses to end the age-old approach to handling documents internally. The emergence of deep learning techniques in computer vision and NLP has enabled a new breed of Data Digitization Solutions.

Manual data extraction has its set of challenges, such as:

Difference between digitization and digitalization and digital transformation

Digitization and digitalization may sound very similar however, there is quite a distinction. For instance, digitalization can only happen after digitization. Digitization is the process of converting data which would otherwise be on paper, into the digital space. Digitalization refers to the phenomenon of digitizing data in a particular space – a business or industry. It is a strategy that is implemented to help carry out digitized processes which will innately speed up processes within any company or industry.

Now unlike both these terms, digital transformation is a much broader term which focuses on the people. It is the adaptation of technology and digital data by the masses. It needs change to happen within an organization so that all their data is now digital. It requires them to be able to access this data and process it. Digital transformation is this process wherein people of the company start to work with the digitized data and interact with it to create meaningful impact. Digital tools like AI back up the process of digital transformation.

Why is data digitization important?

For businesses to thrive in today’s world, it is important to have insights based on analytics and a processing network in place to run through the major chunk of the data. This can only be done through Digitalization of Businesses. It’s simply too slow to do this scope of work manually. To make use of the growing technology that’s been developed constantly, it is crucial to have all company documents digitized.

As data is constantly in demand, digitization has tremendous scope and opportunity. Almost every sector needs data; hence, it is safe to say data digitization has one foot in every industry, be it manufacturing to retail, logistics to consumer goods, or banking to insurance.

Data Digitization use cases

A few businesses use cases are mentioned below:

Form digitization: Multi-page paper-based forms involving a mix of typed text, handwriting, checkboxes, and other fields and tables will be better handled when digitized.

Dynamic extraction or touch-free zero template extraction: Helps deal with non-standard, non-structured input documents that contain the same information in varying layouts. Content classification and extraction from mixed-type documents: Digitization solutions cater to extracting data and digitizing them from documents of varying types and formats.

Information consistency checking: Every business has a specific complex use case requiring mature products, which address all the previous use cases and support the definition of consistency verification rules that enforce Domain-Specific Rules for information consistency.

6 Advantage and disadvantages of Data Digitization

Advantages:

The flip side:

Conclusion

Data Digitization is the future of all industries and quite rightfully so to help businesses achieve process efficiencies and address bottlenecks arising from processing paper-based documents for extracting unstructured data. The above use cases and applications aptly point out why data digitization solutions have become the need of the hour.

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