The problem
Paper forms may be out of fashion, but they seem determined to stay in certain sectors, fields and industries. After all, paper is still a simple, effective and inexpensive way to record the condition of a piece of equipment, hand in a work order or report inventory items.
There are three reasons the paper form is still very much alive.
1 – The environment it’s used in
Sunlight makes a tablet hard to read; cold or protective equipment can make a digital device impossible to operate. In some settings, such as a mine shaft, using a tablet is sometimes simply out of the question given the harsh conditions — humidity, water and dust.
2 – Time on site
It’s true that using a digital form can take more time on site. The point of digitally transforming field data capture is rather to cut the time spent digitizing paper forms once they’re completed. Taken as a whole, the process costs less.
Time on site, though, is sometimes limited. Taking longer on site when time is short is sometimes impossible.
3 – Digital skills
Let’s be honest: plenty of people still don’t have the skills, the capacity or the desire to adapt to digital transformation at any cost. Facing a shortage of skilled labour, an employer makes a conscious choice not to force the change.
Real as those three reasons are, digitizing paper forms is expensive and slow. Based on our interviews, mining companies may have up to four people doing this work. And that can look minor next to the fact that two weeks or more can pass between a form being completed and the results showing up in the systems for analysis.
The proposed solution
In answer to those three obstacles, we suggest a middle path that won’t disrupt the people using paper in the field, but that will have a real effect on how fast the process runs.
We propose an automatic digitization station for paper forms, able to read the questions and the answers, record the answers in a structured database, and transfer the form results into the required systems.
Technically, we use a digital camera in a box much like a conventional scanner. A reader takes a photo, and an AI-based character recognition system handles understanding the text and the form type. The data is recorded in a database chosen by the client. Once centralized, the data is then transferred through an API into the client’s systems.
The benefits
By automating digitization and the transfer of information to the right systems, the company optimizes its data capture process and makes the data available in the right places, so the necessary decisions can be made. It can then reduce manual work, put people on higher-value tasks, and lower the risk of data-entry errors.
