Supply chains are the backbone of commercial organisation. Without effective supply chain processes, any company will fold like a pack of cards. Confusion between managers, customers and vendors will run rampant. Repeated processes that are both time-consuming and will cost a business money. Delays in delivering promises, extended times to bring products to market, even poor product quality are all effects of poor supply management.
Businesses that thrive in the modern commercial world have one thing in common above all else. Is it reputation? Well, yes, but not every successful company has a stellar reputation, Uber, anyone? Could it be quality of product or service? Possibly, but then again, McDonalds is reported to feed 70 million people daily, despite perennial controversies about how healthy their food is.
So, if it’s not reputation or quality, what is the determining factor of a business’ ongoing success? Supply chain management. Why? Without efficient supply chain management, organisations simply cannot meet delivery times and or production costs. It’s that simple.
Eye-Opening Supply Chain and AI Receipt Scanning Statistics
Businesses that thrive today have a digitised supply chain. Interested in learning a statistic behind that statement? Consider this: 89% of companies with a digital supply chain receive perfect orders from regional, national, and international suppliers. This guarantees on-time delivery.
Next generation technology is essential to securing such efficient supply chain management. AI receipt scanning is one such technology, cloud computing is another. How? Human error is removed, and processes are optimised. Indeed, the best AI receipt reading technology, such as the software used by Tabscanner achieves 98% accuracy!
Let us ask you a question: do you think that you’d be able to manually input the data of hundreds, thousands or, more appropriately, a hundred million receipts to 98% accuracy?
Automating data capture and management is the future. Even if we forget about accuracy, manually entering data creates a departmental bottleneck across the supply chain which causes delays… and these are just two of the ways an OCR AI receipt scanner is essential to supply chain management.
The Receipt Parsing Digitisation Pipeline
There are four steps to the receipt digitisation pipeline. These four steps make up the full end-to-end approach and are:
- Pre-processing
- OCR with the help of AI
- Data extraction
- Data upload and storage
Let’s look at each step in a little more detail.
Pre-processing receipts with AI scanning
No two receipts are ever the same. The line content may be the same, think of the dishes ordered at a restaurant, but the grey scaling, thresholding and noise will be different.
This involves grey scaling, thresholding, and noise removal. What is grey scaling, thresholding, and noise removal?
Grey scaling is the process of converting an RGB image to a greyscale image. Thresholding is the simplest method of segmenting images, replacing each pixel with a block of colour pixel, depending on the intensity of the image. Noise removal is the process of removing Gaussian noise. Think the static on an analogue TV, that’s Gaussian noise.
Now think how valuable pre-processing is to receipt recognition. It is essential to completing a clear digital copy of the receipt. Without it, data will undoubtably be lost and this will cause a complete breakdown of the supply chain.
AI Receipt Reading OCR
The next step in the pipeline is AI receipt scanning. In a basic way, OCR reads the text a scanned receipt, invoice or document and then converts the data on the paper to digital format.
Having evolved considerably over the last few years, the best OCR technology, like the OCR used by Tabscanner, is now capable of converting data from any language, type, or character set in the world to digital format with precision accuracy. OCR has two steps: detection and recognition.
The receipt recognition technology developed by allows businesses to manage their expenses with autonomy and confidence. This contributes greatly to the efficiency of a supply chain, allowing businesses to focus on building a lauded brand reputation or improving their service offerings.
Information Extraction from Receipts
Rule-based information extraction has become increasingly commonplace. This sets the parameters for OCR data extraction to make sure that all necessary information is converted from print to digital format.
However, there is one issue with rule-based information extraction: it is heavily reliant on predefined template rules to extract information from receipt or invoice layout. Without this, field data will be lost, and supply chain efficiency compromised.
Tabscanner’s API does not suffer this problem. As the world’s most accurate receipt scanning technology, Tabscanner more than lives up to its name, capable of recognising and converting data of all layouts, and characters and languages with ease.
Data Upload and Storage
Once all the required information has been extracted, the next stage is to upload and store receipt, invoice, or documents data. Use a JSON file format and you can easily convert data into XML files, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files or plaintext files.
This data can then be uploaded into the cloud for safe, shareable, and accessible storage. Businesses can then optimise workflow processes, saving them much resource.
Processes can be greatly improved upon with just the simple action of extracting, uploading, storing, and sharing data. There are many benefits, including in-house transparency and ease of communication between employees, remote working possibilities and, of course, streamlining workloads… who wants to input numerical data into field after field on Excel if they don’t have to?
So, as you can see using AI receipt scanning technology is one of the most effective ways of optimising supply chains. If you’d like to learn how you can save valuable resources, like time and money and optimise processes, get in touch with Tabscanner today and learn more about our receipt OCR software, powered by AI technology.