The Case For Capturing Documents Using Barcodes By Mike Stuhley, Formtran

"SAFE" - secure, accurate, fast and easy
What do boarding passes, potato chips and overnight packages have in common? They all use barcodes. Barcodes are prevalent in everyday life because they are "SAFE". Secure, Accurate, Fast and Easy.

Barcodes are secure because they are difficult to alter and can be encrypted. They are accurate because the accuracy rate is virtually 100% and can be enhanced with check digits. Barcodes are fast enough to scan your items at the grocery store or get you onto the plane at the airport. Barcodes are easy to generate because they are basically just a font that can used in any software program and be printed on paper, labels or any other type of document.

We all use barcodes everyday. They are an accepted part of life because they are "SAFE". Secure, accurate, fast and easy. We can adapt barcodes to solve the biggest problem in indexing scanned documents which is the slow speed and inaccuracy of human operators. We can use pre-printed barcodes or barcode labels on individual documents or use the coversheet concept with pre-printed barcodes to handle document "packages". Using barcodes to index scanned documents provides the fastest, most accurate way to identify the documents and route them to their ultimate destination.

Mike Stuhley is the president of Formtran, Inc. (www.formtran.com), GoScan, Inc. (www.goscan.com) and Tech Coast Angels (www.techcoastangels.com). He has over sixteen years of software experience, holding executive positions with Scantron and Cardiff Software. He is a frequent speaker at industry events. You can contact Mike at 949-829-5822 or mstuhley@formtran.com.