Data Mining for Dollars

The more you know, the more you're aware you could be saving. And the deeper you dig, the richer the reward.

That's today's data mining capsulation of your realization: awareness of cost-saving options amid logistical obligations.

According to global trade group Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), fewer than 25% of organizations in North America and Europe are currently utilizing captured data as part of their business process. With high ease and low cost associated with utilization of their information, this unawareness is shocking. And costly.

Shippers - you're in prime position to benefit the most by data mining and assessing your electronically-captured billing records, by utilizing a freight bill processing provider, to realize and receive significant savings.

Whatever your volume, the more you know about your transportation options, throughout all modes, the easier it is to ship smarter and save. A freight bill processor is able to offer insight capable of saving you 5% - 15% annually on your transportation expenditures.

The University of California - Los Angeles states that data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - knowledge that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is an analytical tool that allows investigation of data from many different dimensions, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations among dozens of fields in large relational databases. Practically, it leads you to noticeable shipping savings.

Data mining and subsequent reporting of shipping activity will yield discovery of timely, actionable information that empowers you to make the best logistics decisions based on carrier options, along with associated routes, rates and fees. This function also provides a deeper understanding of trends, opportunities, weaknesses and threats. Exploration of pertinent data, in any combination over any time period, enables you the operational and financial view of your functional flow, ultimately providing you significant cost savings.

With data mining, you can create a report based on a radius from a ship point, or identify opportunities for service or modal shifts, providing insight regarding carrier usage by lane, volume, average cost per pound, shipment size and service type. Performance can be measured based on overall shipping expenditures, variances from trends in costs, volumes and accessorial charges.

The easiest way to get into data mining of your transportation information is to form an alliance with a freight bill processor that provides this independent analytical tool, and utilize their unbiased technologies and related abilities to make shipping decisions that'll enable you to ship smarter and save.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-for-Dollars&id=7061178

Advantages of Outsourcing Data Conversion Services

Data conversion is the process of converting data from one format to another. In this era of IT revolution, data conversion services is a vital tool in getting information on finger tips. It has acquired a unique place in this internet driven, fast growing business world.

It gives handiness and security to business organizations in managing, updating and retrieving data. This services help firms to convert their precious data and gather papers into digital format for long-term storage. The data can be stored for the purpose of archiving, easy searching, accessing and sharing.

More and more highly experienced BPO companies are coming into this market providing full range of reliable and trustworthy data conversion services to their clients worldwide. These BPO companies are fully prepared with excellent infrastructure and skilled manpower as per clients' expectations and specifications.

Some of the data conversion services which are available in market are as follows:

•     Document conversion
•     HTML conversion
•     XML conversion
•     SGML conversion
•     CAD conversion
•     Image Conversion
•     Book conversion
•     PDF conversion
•     Catalog conversion
•     MS Excel conversion
•     Indexing
•     OCR / ICR Clean up, OMR

It is a process of changing bits from one format to another in order to get relative interoperability or ability to use new features. By outsourcing  this services companies can minimize the risk, cut down costs and thereby focus on their core issues. Offshore BPO companies are consistent, simple and one stop solution provider.

Advantages of outsourcing data conversion services:

•     Focus on core business activities
•     Avoids paper work
•     Cuts down operating expenses
•     Promotes business as effectively as possible
•     Eliminates data redundancy
•     Easy accessibility of data at any time
•     Systemizes company's data in simpler format

If you are planning to outsource this kind of task to an external service provider, better make sure that the provider is consistent in quality, productivity and customer service operations. Automating any business by conversion services definitely increases the productivity of that company.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-of-Outsourcing-Data-Conversion-Services&id=2666931

Acrobat OCR: Make your scanned documents searchable

Though OCR was added in Acrobat a while back, we still see a lot of users who are pleasantly surprised when they get to know that Acrobat could also do OCR. This topic also gets a fair amount of coverage on Twitter and Blogworld. So we thought it might be a good idea to provide a quick overview of OCR in Acrobat 9. Read on if you are interested in knowing more on how to make a document searchable using Acrobat 9.

Users could make a document searchable using Acrobat in 2 different ways. Subsequent sections provide more details on each of these ways.

    During Scan process
    On an already scanned PDF/Image

OCR during Scan process itself

If you have a paper document, that you need to scan and also make searchable, you can use Acrobat to do both in a single step. Go to Taskbar Create >> PDF from Scanner and choose any of the 3 document presets (Black & White Document, Grayscale Document, Color Document). These 3 Presets have OCR option enabled by default so you can get a fully searchable scanned PDF in a single click.

To verify if the OCR option is enabled in the chosen preset, you can click on “Configure Presets” menu option (shown in the screenshot above Create >> PDF from Scanner >> Configure Presets). Choose the appropriate preset in Preset textbox, and verify if Make Searchable (Run OCR) checkbox is on. If it is not checked, check it, save the preset and then press Ok to close the Configure Presets dialog.

 Click on Options (next to OCR checkbox) to view and change the OCR settings. Change the Primary OCR Language, if required and then choose the PDF Output Style from the following style options.

    Searchable Image / Searchable Image (Exact): Use this option if you want to keep the scanned image, but still want the text to be searchable. In this case, Acrobat adds a hidden text layer on top of the image. This text is searchable using Acrobat or other desktop search engines.
    ClearScan: This is a new option added in Acrobat 9. Use this option, if you want to keep the look of the document same but still want to convert the scanned image to text so as to reduce the file size. Rick Borstein has more details on Clearscan in his blog posting here.

Once the preset is saved after making changes to OCR option, place the paper in the scanner’s feeder, click on same preset from Create Taskbar (Create >> PDF from Scanner >>…), and you will get a scanned PDF which is fully searchable.

To verify if the OCR is successfully completed, and document is indeed searchable, you can try selecting text using the select tool in Acrobat. If text is selected, then OCR has completed successfully. You can also copy this text and paste it in other applications like Word, Notepad etc.

Tip for improving OCR accuracy during Scanning process

You can improve OCR accuracy while scanning by modifying the compression options under Optimization frame either in Configure Presets dialog or in Custom Scan dialog.

On clicking Options, you will get Optimization Options dialog. Change to Custom Settings, and under compression frame, choose Lossless compression for Color/GrayScale and CCITT Group 4 for Monochrome images. This will ensure that OCR gets to work on highest quality image thereby improving the OCR accuracy. This is especially useful in low resolution scans (<=150DPI).

If you do not want to use presets for scanning, and instead want to use your own scanning settings, you can also use Custom Scan option (Create >> PDF from Scanner >> Custom Scan), which will prompt you to provide all scan related settings and then proceed for scanning. Also note that this is the only option available for Scanning if you are using Acrobat Pro on a Mac (Create >> PDF from Scanner).

Check the OCR option here if you want your scanned PDF to be searchable.

OCR on already scanned PDFs/Images

If you already have a scanned PDF that you received from someone, and you want to make it searchable, you can do so by going to Document >> OCR Text Recognition >> Recognize Text using OCR.

Choose the pages that you want to OCR, click on edit to choose Primary OCR Language, and PDF Output Style, and then click OK and OK again to initiate the OCR process for currently open Scanned PDF.

Another Tip for Improving OCR accuracy if you have a scanned image in TIFF format

If you have a scanned image in an image format like TIFF, you can make this image searchable in Acrobat by first converting it into PDF and then running OCR. Before you convert this image into PDF, you should change the compression options that are used in converting this image to PDF. To do that, go to Edit > Preferences > Convert to PDF, select the image format (e.g. TIFF), click on Edit settings and then change the image compression options here.

    For Monochrome, change the compression to either JBIG2 (Lossless) or CCITT G4
    For Grayscale/Color, change to ZIP which is a lossless compression format.

After changing the compression settings for the image format, you can convert the image to PDF, either by dragging this image and dropping onto Acrobat or using Create PDF from File and then run OCR from Document menu as explained above.

This is a broad overview of how you can make your scanned documents searchable using Acrobat. Let us know if you have any questions.

Source:http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/acrobat_ocr_make_your_scanned/