ocr vs. urjanet

OCRvs.

Urjanet

OCR vs. Urjanet

For some organizations, the days of manually entering utility bill data are over. These organizations have come to the realization that in this day and age, no successful business organization can truly grow with scale by conducting a vital part of its operations and processes with manual methods. After doing the research and looking into the tools and technologies that can help automate these processes to some degree, organizations come across OCR software, and often consider it as a viable option for their organization.

Here at Urjanet we get a lot of people coming to us and asking, “How does Urjanet differ from OCR software? Why should we choose Urjanet over OCR?” The difference is tremendous.

If your organization is considering or has deployed optical character recognition software for your in-house utility bill data processing needs, you may be doing more work than you need to do. These next few slides outline the investment, maintenance, and repeated monthly processes that are generally required for an organization to deploy an OCR solution, and compare the OCR solution to Urjanet’s solution and output.

OCR

The Method

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a common method of electronically converting typewritten or printed text into machine-

encoded text.

OCR

Purchase OCR

software & build

templates

Gather paper bills & sort into batches by customer or utility

Scan bills for

processing

Store paper bills on or off-

site

Affix a specific

bar code to each

paper bill

OCR software

processes each

scanned bill

OCR software notifies

operator of

exceptions*

Review exceptions

Setup & Configuration

Paper Handling

Manually append any data

points that do not get delivered

on bill

Processing Post- Processing

*An Urjanet customer who used OCR technology prior to deploying Urjanet’s solution noted that almost 65% of OCR-processed bills generated an exception in the system.

Urjanet

The Method

Urjanet’s technology platform provides an automated feed of high-quality, normalized, and timely utility bill data.

Urjanet Utility Data

Provide list of utility

providers and login

credentials

N/A N/A N/AN/A N/A N/A N/A

Setup & Configuration

Paper Handling

N/A

Processing Post- Processing

Data Output

With OCR software, you get data that:

➢ Can arrive weeks after being posted by the utility, potentially resulting in late fees if not paid on time

➢ Can be incomplete, partial, and inconsistent➢ May contain errors and data defects

(sometimes resulting in 65% of bills with exceptions)

➢ Requires upfront investments in hardware➢ Requires development resources for template-

building➢ Needs manual review

With Urjanet, you get data that:

➢ Arrives in a timely manner➢ Is exceptionally detailed➢ Has been normalized➢ Is extremely accurate➢ Minimizes human intervention➢ Requires no ongoing maintenance➢ Requires no auditing or error-checking on your

part➢ Allows your organization to grow with scale

For more information, check out our blog post:

urjanet.com/ocr-vs-urjanet