Should AP Departments Consider OCR?

Over the past few years Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has always been a topic of discussion with AP Departments looking for process improvement. Over the last year it has become a “hot” topic! Every single client I talk with has decided on implementing OCR or is strongly considering implementing OCR.

Why the recent change?

Corporations are looking to not only automate functionality but as I have stated in past blogs, they are very focused on process optimization by elimination of as many touch points as possible. With high volume invoice processing, data entry has always been not only a bottleneck but also a point of input errors that result in rework. To post paper invoices immediately after scan without human intervention is not possible without OCR.

Another contributing factor is the significant improvement in the accuracy of the invoice capture. A few years prior, unless invoices fit a set of specific patterns or templates, departments spent too much time manually adjusting OCR invoices. Some of the early adopters found the successful hit rate at the invoice level so low the resulting value was marginal or less…resulting in some abandoning the use of their OCR solutions. Today, OCR solutions such as the Optional Optical Character Recognition option for SAP Invoice Management utilize advance capture logic that is much more accurate than templates alone.

The resulting accuracy improvement capturing both header and line item invoice meta data and the corresponding reduction in data entry now make OCR a solution very much worthy of consideration.

See SAP EcoHub for More on AP Optimization