The Case For Offshore Data Entry
Almost everything is run by computers today. They have become an integral part of our lives, handling everything from business to travel to entertainment and even most of our personal matters. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that it all started with just a handful of large and expensive mainframes, and the business of using those mainframes was called data processing. Collecting data and feeding it into those giant machines was a time-consuming procedure as the data was punched onto cards before it could be processed and analyzed.
Things have changed dramatically in computing over the past 50 years. Processing power is essentially free today, with the chips in notebook computers and even our smartphones infinitely quicker than those mainframes at the dawn of the information age. What hasn’t changed nearly as much is data entry. That largely remains an error-prone process that often requires manual labor and/or intervention. Think about all the ways we enter data and you quickly see that it’s the most critical point in the process, the point that consumes the most time and also the point where errors occur most likely.
A lot of the innovation in computerized systems today is not in building better and faster computers, but in perfecting data capture and data entry systems. There are scanners that read barcodes, systems that have radio frequency tags, machines that scan and convert forms, and numerous other ways to make the process of converting data into machine-readable form. All of this has made data entry faster, cheaper and more reliable, but it still remains perhaps the most critical bottleneck. Why?
Because a lot of data is generated by people, and people think and act differently from machines. When people fill out forms by hand, they may make errors, cross things out, and their handwriting may be nearly illegible. Even when they use an electronic form, they may use the wrong fields, or enter the data in a way that the computer cannot read. There are all sorts of efforts to automatically “clean” data, but even today, a lot of data must still be either entered by hand, or at least scanned and fixed by hand. And that can be enormously time consuming and therefore expensive.
There are other aspects of data entry that can burn up a lot of time. Data conversion is one of them. There are so many different data formats today that data conversion is a major issue. Even converting from one version of a format to another can totally throw the process and require extensive manual intervention. Something as seemingly simple as converting from one version of Microsoft Word to another can be hugely time-consuming, let alone conversions to and from formats such as XML, SGML, XLS or CSV. Add to that image conversion, data indexing, or data mining, and things can quickly go from time consuming to overwhelming.
This is where it pays to farm things out to an experienced professional data entry service. It’s also one of the areas where outsourcing makes most sense. Getting the raw data or data files to a reliable, inexpensive offshore data entry service for entry and cleaning, or even converting and processing in a number of ways, greatly reduces local costs. It also allows local staff to spend their time mot productively, by analyzing and using data to manage business and maximize productivity. It’s a win-win situation for all involved.
Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web. Learn more about Professional data entry.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com
