Three Doors Of Opportunity For Boosting Gains Of Automated Forms Processing

By Jim Franklin, Parascript

The evolution of automated forms processing has driven huge gains for businesses across the industry spectrum – from insurance, healthcare, financial services, and banking to government, business process outsourcing (BPO), data processing centers, and beyond – but the gains have not come as a sweeping, uniform change. There are multiple doors of opportunity through which some organizations and industry segments have yet to step: boosting efficiency through form consistency, optimizing processes that include both paper forms and electronic data, and automated identification and classification of documents by their content are all exciting future chapters.

Forms design, font style, and recognition tools have the potential to make automation recognition even more accurate. Establishing standards for bringing some consistency to form design has been another matter. Marketing departments typically determine the format and style of forms, and there is often little regard for optimizing the design of a form. Parascript has published some form design guidelines, but there has yet to be wholesale adoption of standards.