Many practices and jobs that at one time required a person, have been replaced by technology instead. Financial institutions rely on algorithms when making lending decisions, postal service workers and accountants have lost jobs due to increase in email and tax software systems, and even stores are using self-checkout lines to cut back on cashiers. While it may seem that at some point all jobs may soon be done by a robot, there will still be many needs that will always require a manual component.
Christian Buckley, the director of product evangelism at administration and security software company Axceler, explained in a blog post for AIIM that "robots will not replace us any time soon." Some tools have been able to improve efficiency and ease can also cause mistakes that doing the job manually may have avoided. He gives the example of spell check and smartphone auto corrections. While sometimes the word that is replaced is correct, there are many other times that a word is incorrectly replaced or suggested, based on an algorithm.
"Don't rely on automation to replace your management duties — i.e. your need to make decisions — but instead use it to highlight inconsistencies or exceptions to your model, allowing you to make more complete, tempered decisions," he wrote.
This goes for data entry trends as well. Though automatic entry can often make accurate decisions when inputting handwriting or other obscure data, there will always be times when manual entry will be needed. With double key data entry, often used by document scanning services, data is keyed in twice and compared to find any mistakes, and can be manually altered for the most accurate data. While an automatic system can increase efficiency, without a manual component some data could easily be miskeyed.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago based company with over 53 years of experience as a data processing service provider. We provide business with outsourcing solutions for document scanning services, data entry services and mailing/lettershop services. As an SOC2-approved service organization, we apply industry-best practices to our approach with clients.