We are a management consulting firm and are seeking OCR software (optical character recognition) on behalf of an office services provider. The reason for this is pressure from a major client to significantly reduce the error rate in the text processing of scanned or handwritten documents. At the same time, the cost-effectiveness of the service for the major client must be significantly improved. This can be achieved primarily through faster text processing.
Therefore, the following requirements must be met:
- Basic Functions
- Recognition of ASCII characters in poorly scanned texts
- Recognition of handwritten characters
- Providing, evaluating, and prioritizing alternatives
- Data
- Storage only in temporary memory while processing an open job
- No permanent storage, only on the client’s network
- Output
- Format – recognized text elements in Word format
- Text source (from fax, email, paper) must be scanned and converted into a Word document using OCR software
- Frequency – processing of approx. 200 documents daily
- Requirements – probability indication for text recognition, highlighting of unclear characters or text passages
- Special features of the source document, such as boxes, lines, dashes, special characters, and spacing in lines and paragraphs, must be preserved
- Employees then supplement the generated Word document with additional alphanumeric text content
- Printing of documents primarily on the client’s letterhead; printing of the finished Word document on the client’s letterhead
- Interface with MS Word, approx. 200 documents daily
- User requirements and preferences
- Easy to learn
- User-friendliness
- Synergies with repetitive text
- Security, capacity, availability, speed, administration
- Compliance with the major client’s IT security standards
- Integration into the client’s systems must still be verified, depending on requirements
- System requirements (e.g., compatibility)
- Client software must run on MS Windows 7 and higher
- Multi-user capability
- Data storage on the client’s external server
- Services provided by the vendor
- Delivery of suitable software
- Customization
- Implementation
- Commissioning
- Training
- User-friendly training materials
- User-friendly documentation
- Possibly a Help Desk
- Documentation - User manual, online help
- Reference customers are strongly desired
Approximately 15 software workstations are planned, of which approximately 8 users should be able to work with the system simultaneously. The users include members of management, group leaders, and administrative staff.
Note from SoftGuide: A requirements specification can be requested from SoftGuide.