Quality control is essential, especially in the safety critical areas of Pharmaceuticals and Medicine where missing words or illegible numbers could directly affect the health of a patient. However, document verification isn’t limited to these industries.
In fact, many other industries can save time and money by aiming for 100% accuracy in their printed material.
What Is A Document Verification System?
When you create a document, let’s say for example an instruction manual, it will go through many 
checks and proofs before you arrive at the final master copy. By the time it has been through the production system, errors may have crept in again. Document Verification Systems automate the checking of documents against master copies and can highlight many different issues. Mistakes of many different types can be spotted by document verification - it’s not just misplaced punctuation that can be found, but differences in colour or mistakes in Braille too.
Other areas that a Document Verification System can help in include barcode verification - to ensure that barcodes are legible and refer to the correct item - and OCR validation - ensuring that digital copies are exact replicas of their paper counterparts.
Why Is It Important?
In a safety critical area such as the pharmaceutical industry a single misplaced dot could turn a dosage of 160mg into 16.0mg causing the treatment to be ineffective. Or, if it were to happen the other way around, it could cause a patient to take an excessive dose.
Even if your industry is not so sensitive, mistakes can simply sour your customer's opinion of you. Consider the flat-pack furniture industry for example. If a customer has spent hours trying to put together a bookcase, they’re likely to curse your company if they've wasted time trying to fit part E only to find it should have been part F they needed.
Your employees themselves can waste time too if documents and barcodes are unreadable. Time spent trying to work out what was intended, time spent doing the wrong thing or time spent entering SKU information by hand can all rack up, meaning your business isn’t operating as efficiently as it could.
Do I Really Need A Document Verification System?
You may already have a quality control department. You might already have proof-readers who are supposed to catch mistakes like these. The problem is that those people are only human. Humans, no matter how conscientious, may get tired and start letting errors slip through. A computerised Document Verification System will find all discrepancies between a document and the master copy. Your quality control department doesn’t need to spend time comparing pages that are already 100% identical – they can focus on the problem pages which will make their jobs more efficient. And by being a tool rather than a solution your people can do what they are good at – deciding if the discrepancy is serious enough to need fixing.
If you’re wondering whether you need a document verification system, here at AIS Ltd, we can help. Why not take a look at the document verification systems we have available and start running your business with fewer errors and more efficiency.