OCR-based ROI

What do we mean by OCR-based ROI? It is the ability of a Company to show a clear return on investment from converting its paper documents to searchable electronic files. This metric is not always easy to compute. Unlike automation, it does not necessarily involve reducing the workforce, but may instead make the work time of existing employees more productive. Having a Google-like ability to find documents at a law firm, bank, financial institution, or insurance company should greatly reduce a Company's cost of locating documents and make the related workers more productive. In the long term, this should involve a clear ROI for the Company, but might be difficult to quantify precisely.

If introducing fully text-searchable documents will reduce the size of the Company's file room staff or mailroom staff then the ROI case becomes rather straightforward. Of course, if conversion to searchable documents, say from TIFF to PDF image + hidden text format, is combined with compression than it becomes easier to show tangible ROI. If the document file size after converting to compressed, searchable, web-optimized PDF is 10x smaller than before then, searchability notwithstanding, one can make a clear ROI argument based on reduced storage requirements, reduced document-related transmission bandwidth requirements, and reduced web-hosting fees.

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