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From Paper to Digital: How OpenKM Facilitates the Management of Budgets and Delivery Notes

Written by Ana Canteli on May 13, 2024

Document management has been a constant challenge for businesses, especially in the transition from paper-based processes to digital solutions. In this article, we'll explore how OpenKM, an advanced document management platform, facilitates the transition from paper to digital, with a specific focus on budget and delivery note management.

Historical Origins of Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition (OCR) has its roots in the 20th century, when Emanuel Goldberg developed a machine capable of reading characters and converting them into standard telegraph code in 1914. However, significant advances in OCR did not come until 1974, when Ray Kurzweil improved the ability to recognize printed characters, with the goal of creating a reading system for the visually impaired.

Advantages of OCR and Document Process Automation

OCR, along with document process automation, offers a number of key benefits for businesses:

• Task Automation: OpenKM enables the automation of document capture, classification, and archiving, reducing the need for repetitive manual tasks and improving operational efficiency.
• Going Paperless: With OpenKM, businesses can say goodbye to paper and digitize their documents, making it easier to store, organize, and search for information.
• Saving Time and Increasing Productivity: Automating document processes saves time and increases productivity by reducing the risk of human error and improving the speed of access to information.
• Security and Traceability: OpenKM offers advanced security features, such as digital signatures and audit trails to improve the traceability of actions, which ensure the integrity and confidentiality of documents.

Relationships and Use Cases functionality in the Management of Budgets and Delivery Notes

OpenKM's Relationships functionality plays a crucial role in the management of quotes and delivery notes, allowing the linking and tracking of related documents. Here's an illustrative use case:

The use case deals with uploading several types of documents: quotes and delivery notes. Both types of documents share an identifier, which will serve to create a relationship between them. This is possible thanks to the creation of two optical character recognition templates and an automatism to create the relationship, automatically.

The user can start the process with both a quote and a delivery note.

Let's take a file as an example of a budget.

In the OCR template we have set the title "request for quotation" as a validator and in the upper right corner the document identifier appears. The zonal OCR template is completed with the capture of other fields such as: Customer, Reference, Article, Page, etc. The OCR template is prepared to be able to read the fields, even if colors have been applied to it, as in this case, in which the identifier has been highlighted with a blue highlighter.

This document is the packing slip.

In this case, the validator field appears in this area and is an alphanumeric code that begins with the letters BR. And just like with the quote template, extra data such as customer name, quantity, etc. is also captured.

The field highlighted in blue is the one used by OpenKM to establish the relationship between quotes and delivery notes.

To verify this, we uploaded a document to the platform. This is parsed by the zonal OCR engine, which extracts the file's metadata. If we access the file's metadata, we can see that OpenKM has identified the document type, it is a quote, and has extracted all the important data, to fill in the metadata group associated with the quotes.

If we continue with the example, we will upload another file. In this case, it is a delivery note. We can check this in the metadata tab, which shows, again, how OpenKM correctly identifies the document type, associating the corresponding metadata group "delivery note" and filling in the fields with the data extracted through optical character recognition.

And now, if we go to the Relationships tab, we see how the packing slip is linked to the budget. If we click on the relationship, the system takes us to the budget, where we can see the reflection of the relationship. Now, on the Budget Relationships tab, we see that the delivery note or packing slip is listed.

This relationship is of the parent-child type, i.e., a quotation originates a delivery note. And this automation works in all registered use cases, i.e. a quote can be related to a multitude of delivery notes.

Everything we've seen in this example is customizable. From zonal OCR templates, to the definition of possible relationships, among other features.

For more information, we recommend that you contact us. We will offer you a personalized online demo. Contact us.