The limits of extraction technologies & how to boost what you have

Extraction technologies and automation solutions may be the best combo since “ctrl + c” & “ctrl + v” came onto the scene.

When combined, they can augment your business and move employee productivity to higher levels by removing the bottlenecks in your organization’s processes.

But unfortunately, too often these solutions fail to live up to customer expectations.

Typically, one to two years after implementing an extraction solution, businesses find themselves having to spend valuable time validating information their solution wasn’t confident in extracting. That means team members are still stuck performing manual data entry tasks.

What trips up extraction technologies?

Handwritten content, character-based languages, and unstructured data from documents or images tend to stall these systems.

Consider the scenario of processing TIFF images or PDFs created from original documents. When run through an OCR system, it’s almost always necessary for a human to go back and view the image or PDF to ensure the data was captured correctly or make corrections themselves.

Sure, extraction technologies do provide some measure of process improvement. But it’s a significant investment, and when you’re not seeing the returns you want in time, productivity, or even reduced frustration, you’re paying a higher cost for something that should’ve produced your ideal situation.

Remedy over replacement

Consider your automation rates. If they’re too low or the process is too slow, then ask yourself these questions:

• Are volatile or unpredictable volume spikes leading to staffing and workload balance issues?
• Is incoming bad quality data (like mobile images, handwritten content, etc.) creating a bottleneck?
• What’s the slowest link weighing down your process?

Technology has its limitations, but don’t panic. The good news is you don’t have to overhaul the system and replace it with a new one.

Instead, look to crowdsourcing to remedy and improve your existing extraction solution.

Crowdsourcing: the add-on hero for data processing

ScaleHub deploys a combination of crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to help augment your existing solution or replace it (if you’re ready for a change).

But how? Let’s apply the three variables above:

• Staffing, workload balance, and those unexpected spikes: ScaleHub allows for instant scalability when needed. Our access to a 24/7 on-demand workforce of 2.3 million global crowd contributors will enable you to easily tap into increased productivity when you need it.
• Bad quality data & bottlenecks: 100% accuracy is impossible with traditional capture techniques. Instead, we bridge the gap by bringing humans into the loop via crowdsourcing and microtasking. Our crowd contributors perform verification and exception handling in an instantly scalable way.
• Treating the slowest link in the process: Humans tend to be the slowest link in the processing chain, but our approach turns them into the fastest. ScaleHub uses microtasking and snippeting to improve human capabilities. A fragment of a document or file, such as a word, number, or picture is distributed across a pool of crowd contributors who, in turn, enter its content or confirm it.

See how you can BYOE (Bring Your Own Extraction)

The key to real growth is through technology and humans, instead of going it alone with one or the other. But if you’ve already implemented technology, there’s no need to start from square one again—our solution augments your existing extraction technology.

Check out our new video on how an on-demand workforce can improve your processing times, avoid bottlenecks, and meet demand during the craziest of times.