What do you know about Intelligent Capture?


Learn about a tech solution that can improve your institution's accuracy, efficiency, and productivity with content

In the world of higher education, many chief information officers are looking ahead to virtual reality, gaming, and the role of artificial intelligence, yet there’s a vital technology, available now, that has gone untapped. Intelligent Capture is a straightforward solution that can revolutionize departments across campus.

Intelligent Capture uses optical character recognition (OCR) to convert different types of documents, such as scanned papers, PDF files, or images into editable and searchable data. This seemingly simple process is actually an advanced technology that’s causing a fundamental shift in the way institutions read and process content, unlocking its value in real time.

Adopting Intelligent Capture isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. Rather, tech solutions should solve a problem and add value, such as accuracy, efficiency, and productivity.

Productivity, in particular, can’t be underestimated. If you walk into an office where people are processing transcripts, what does productivity look like? Is it teams of people doing data entry? Is it staff making equivalency decisions without careful documentation or workflows designed to prevent mistakes? Are students submitting transcripts multiple times because they haven’t heard from the institution, and now the office is needlessly touching the same paper or digital document multiple times?

(Next page: Why Intelligent Capture is being used on college campuses)

In every office on campus, it makes sense to minimize this kind of time-consuming and ripe-for-errors data entry. This is where OCR technology comes in. Intelligent OCR, what Hyland calls Brainware for Transcripts, can systematically eliminate data entry and speed transcript processing, while reducing manual errors.

Here are three ways Intelligent Capture can support and transform the student and staff experience in higher education.

    1. Faster intake and decision-making across the institution.
      Intelligent Capture reduces cycle time (how long a process takes), and that has a domino effect. If I get transcript data into a degree audit faster, I can advise faster. I can engage the student faster. In competitive institutions or programs, I can admit faster. All those things serve the student also improve the institution’s reputation and make everyone’s face-to-face time more productive.But the technology goes beyond transcripts. Think of an institution’s accounting or remittance departments. One Hyland customer faced lengthy and complex remittance processes. Eight full-time employees would key the data from checks and remittances at a speed of 400 remittances per hour. The company implemented Brainware Intelligent Capture for Remittances and was able to boost its accounts receivables productivity by almost 500 percent, now regularly processing 2,000 remittances every hour.

      Think of the difference it would make for students and parents to know their tuition, housing, and meal plan payments are up-to-date. With quicker capture and reporting, students’ day-to-day needs are better served, calls to the student billing office are reduced, and the institution has greater visibility, faster.

    2. Improve time and resource management.
      When staff across departments aren’t spending time on tedious data entry, onerous cross-referencing, and other manual tasks, they can focus on tasks that challenge, engage, and move the institution forward. It may feel risky relying on technology to capture data, but intelligent OCR tools can rapidly validate data against existing document management, student information systems, finance, and other back-end systems. This means there is an additional layer of protection that even human operators, reading and keying data from documents, can’t duplicate without manual lookups.That said, there will always be times when we need users to perform verification or manual input. But even during these times, OCR can make the process quicker and easier. With Brainware, for example, when users start typing a value as part of document verification or manual entry, Interactive Data Capture can complete it for them. It works just like familiar search engines, completing values and reducing key strokes. Users can also just click on the screen while viewing a value, or swipe through a phrase, to have that data automatically entered. It highlights the value and indicates the OCR confidence level, alerting users when values might require more scrutiny.

      At the macro level, the best Intelligent Capture solutions will also have built-in consoles that show batch status, operator statistics, extraction accuracy, and serious analytics tools to provide institutions with immediate insights about document-processing operations. With manual document processing, this data gathering would create one more step for an overburdened staff member. That means registrars, academic advisers, financial aid advisers, and accountants can be more dedicated to serving students and finding innovative solutions for the future of higher ed.

    3. Leverage your network.
      It’s time to think creatively. Intelligent Capture for Transcripts is massively scalable, so what if transcript processing happened amongst consortiums of schools? How about if all the colleges within a state system shared access to the captured transcripts and student data, providing accurate snapshots of courses, degree progress, and more?Thanks to enterprise-scaled levels of throughput and reliability, a financial services organization was able to centralize its accounts payable operations in a single location and establish a standardized global protocol for processing invoices into its SAP system.

      Higher ed institutions are often among the largest employers and businesses in a city or region. With options for running Brainware for Transcripts on an in-house server or in the cloud, these disparate departments and locations could leverage the same resources to create cost and time savings.

Making it work

Data capture is the foundation for so many other technologies, as well as critical department functions across campus. When documents and digital content can be captured quickly and reliably, making the extracted data immediately actionable, institutions are more fully equipped to support students, faculty, and staff. In a higher ed environment that’s all about smart decisions and leveraging brainpower, Intelligent Capture makes it easier to do both.

Stay tuned next month for part two of this story, in which the University of Arkansas shares how Intelligent Capture integrated with its PeopleSoft system is speeding transcript processing, accelerating transfer credit evaluations, and securing high school coursework data the university didn’t have before.

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