We live in a digital world, where everything is expected to move faster and more efficiently, including the employee onboarding processes. It’s crucial for organizations in any industry to transform towards digital operations in order to continuously improve their efficiency.
Since restrictions have been lifted and the pandemic has cooled off, we finally see a positive turnaround in the GDP. Businesses and organizations are steadily growing and dare to hire new staff again.
This results in many new employees being hired that need to be entered into the HR system, which gets heavily used again. However, many businesses are not yet prepared for a large employee intake due to their slow and demanding onboarding process.
Luckily, many businesses have already implemented effective solutions which helped them improve their onboarding process by 70%, and so can you.
A common use case is automated ID card scanning using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
This article will disclose how OCR can enhance ID card scanning procedures for employee onboarding.
The Traditional Way of Processing ID Cards and Its Challenges
Typically, the employee onboarding process has been long and demanding for HR to complete. It has been an unpleasant process for businesses and employees alike, filled with constraints and limitations.
Important factors for these bottlenecks are the challenges that arise during the processing steps of an employee’s ID card. The ID card of an employee needs to be verified for identity theft through manual fraud detection to get verified and approved during the onboarding process.
After the verification, HR needs to perform manual data entry to ERP systems or databases. These steps are crucial for businesses to get right. Unfortunately, it often ends up being a tedious and repetitive experience for HR departments.
Let’s have a look at what the traditional process of ID card processing looks like and discuss its drawbacks.
The Traditional Process
Previously, employees either had to send in a copy of their ID card or bring it to a physical location. At this point, employees from the back office needed to verify the ID card manually.
If the document got verified, the back office could start manually extracting and replicating the necessary data into their company’s database.
At this point, the ID card scanning process was finalized. However, the company still had to inform the employee that his or her identity verification process was completed.
After countless hours being consumed and operational costs ending up higher and higher, the ID verification process had taken up a lot of time.
Additionally, on top of this tedious and long process, it stumbles along with multiple drawbacks which should be eliminated.
Drawbacks of the Traditional Process
As you probably can imagine, manually processing employees’ ID cards during the onboarding process comes with plenty of disadvantages.
Competitors who already have implemented an automated solution are at a great advantage and have already addressed these four most important drawbacks of the traditional process.
- Time-consuming: the process involves many hours of manual labor and multiple steps to be completed.
- Inefficient operations: because it requires many costly steps which are poorly planned and executed.
- Scalability: becomes an issue due to the increase in operational and overhead costs.
- Human errors: they are inevitable and, in the long run, will cause serious damage.
The Automated Way of Processing ID Cards and Its Benefits
Now that you have had your memory refreshed on the traditional procedure of ID card processing and which drawbacks it brings, let’s investigate what the automated process looks like.
The automated way of processing ID cards uses OCR technology. Firstly, let’s look at what OCR is before diving into the automated process.
What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition, or OCR in short, is a technology developed to automate data detection and extraction from various document types.
OCR can automatically identify and extract relevant data from different document types. It can structure data and process documents into companies’ databases within a matter of seconds.
The Automated Process
The automated identity card process for employees’ onboarding with OCR is completed within three simple steps.
Step 1: A picture or PDF file of the identity document is uploaded to the OCR engine. This can be done either from a mobile or web application.
If the image is uploaded uncropped, the OCR engine will automatically crop this document. Additionally, the OCR engine can enhance the quality of the image to optimize the following process.
Step 2: OCR automatically detects and extracts necessary data from the ID card. The extracted data is instantly converted into a TXT file (i.e., digital text).
Step 3: In the final step, the OCR engine takes the TXT file and converts it into a structured, machine-readable JSON file.
After these three simple steps have been completed, the ID card is easily processed into the company’s database.
Which Fields Can OCR Extract From ID Cards
Apart from knowing how identifying, extracting, and structuring relevant data for employee onboarding works, it’s interesting to know which fields on the ID card OCR can extract.
Here is a list of the most important fields the OCR engine can extract.
- Full Name
- Nationality
- Date of Birth
- Gender
- Date of Issue
- Valid Through
- Document Number
- Picture from ID card
H3: Benefits of automating ID cards processing
Now that you know what OCR is and how it can provide a seamless ID card scanning process, it’s time to read into the benefits and advantages it provides.
The most important benefits are:
OCR reduces 70% of costs – thanks to fast and accurate document scanning.
OCR reduces 99% of errors – because OCR technology doesn’t get distracted and (almost) never makes typos.
OCR improves speed – with faster turnaround time, organizations can quickly increase employee intake.
OCR prevents fraud – with automated fraud detection through image hashing, EXIF analysis, and Photoshop detection.
Enhance ID Card Processing Through Digital Transformation
Processing ID cards manually is a tedious and time-consuming task. Fortunately, advances in technology have found solutions to these repetitive tasks. Automated ID card OCR processes greatly reduce the overall time spent on processing, optimize operations, minimize costs, and reduce errors and fraud.
As a result of OCR technology, businesses and organizations alike have begun streamlining their ID card scanning process for an efficient employee onboarding process and consequently positively increased the efficiency of their organization.
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]