Fujitsu delivers up to 99.9 percent scanning accuracy with Azure AI form and character recognition

Fujitsu is the world leader in document scanning technology, with more than 50 percent of global market share, but that doesn’t stop the company from constantly innovating. To improve the performance and accuracy of its cloud scanning solution, Fujitsu incorporated Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer. It took only a few months to deploy the new technologies, and they have boosted character recognition rates as high as 99.9 percent. This helps Fujitsu deliver market-leading innovation and give its customers powerful and flexible tools for end-to-end document management.

“With technologies like Form Recognizer, we’re designing intelligent workflows and automation that support information agility and the day-to-day work our customers are doing.”

Bernie Schweiss, Vice President of Sales and Business Development, Fujitsu

A global leader in the scanning industry

Hardcopy scanning is still a vital part of the information workflow in industries like healthcare, where paper forms and faxes are essential to everyday communication. The process can be costly, time-consuming, and present quality challenges that have real-life impacts. Fujitsu—a dominant force in the world of scanners with a global market share of more than 50 percent and up to 85 percent in some industries—is committed to making hardcopy scanning more efficient, accurate, and reliable.

“As the market leader, it’s incumbent upon us to innovate,” says Bernie Schweiss, Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Fujitsu. “Our value proposition is amazing image quality, so any technology we adopt as part of our products or services must provide that.”

Increased speed and OCR accuracy

Designed to simplify high-volume scanning management, Fujitsu’s EdgeXperience is a cloud-based document scanning solution built on Microsoft Azure.

To increase the speed and accuracy of the solution while also providing customers with increased capabilities for extracting text and metadata from documents, Fujitsu turned to Azure Form Recognizer, an Applied AI Service. Form Recognizer has many pre-built and customizable models, including the ability to extract printed and handwritten text from images and document using its Read API for optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR). The content can then be used in a variety of destinations, including Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Azure Blob storage.

Enhancing EdgeXperience with Form Recognizer is proving to be an invaluable decision for Fujitsu. According to the company’s benchmarks, OCR recognition is 99.9 percent with a combination of their image enhancement technology and Microsoft’s OCR technology. With hand-printed text on forms, the recognition is approximately 96 percent or more. With free form handwriting, with no form background, recognition is approximately 97 percent.

“Form Recognizer has produced excellent results,” says Hari Asuri, Senior Director at Fujitsu. “I was very impressed with the high accuracy rates produced by the Microsoft recognition technology, particularly with ICR – recognition above 95 percent is outstanding."

Rapid, seamless implementation

Fujitsu found Microsoft technologies easy to implement. “Form Recognizer has been a phenomenal tool to work with,” says Asuri “We have a small team of three developers, and it took us only three months to get from our initial plans to our first deliverable. Thanks to the built-in security Azure offers, we can focus on the end-to-end security of our solution and rest assured that Azure will properly protect our data.”

Working with Azure as a foundation provides additional benefits. “By basing our work on Azure, we gain access to all the business continuity and disaster recovery features that the platform provides,” says Paul Gramolini, Associate Product Manager at Fujitsu. “We’re making the best use of the cloud in our industry, and that’s one more competitive advantage for us.”

Real-world impacts for Fujitsu and its customers

Fujitsu initially rolled out its scanning solution to the United States market, and it plans on expanding to additional markets in Asia and Europe, taking advantage of multi-language support in Form Recognizer. The company also intends to increase its use of Microsoft technologies, adding the capabilities of Microsoft Power Automate and Dynamics 365 for even greater end-to-end efficiency.

For Fujitsu customers, the increase in scanning accuracy can have significant real-world impacts. For example, healthcare providers may get higher reimbursement levels because of better compliance with data standards. They can also have greater confidence that scanned written prescriptions will be precisely entered into their medical records system. This helps ensure patients get exactly what they need. In a clinical setting, the difference between a “6” and an “8” on a medication order could be the difference between a desired outcome and a serious error. In addition, employees can now spend more time focusing on activities that add patient value rather than manually entering data.

In any industry where hardcopy documents play an important role, the potential to transform inefficient workflows with accurate computer vision is tremendous. “A lot of our competitors are still delivering products that are focused on traditional workflows,” says Schweiss. “With technologies like Form Recognizer, we’re providing customers with what they need now—intelligent workflows and automation that support information agility and the day-to-day work our customers are doing. We’re really creating new paradigms for the scanning industry.”

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