Smartphone Scanning: Helping Cope with Operation Viability

Smartphones are everywhere. They have made our lives way easier than before. From making payments to studying online, smartphones have changed the world. Hence, their use is only on the rise.

You’ll be thrilled to know that there are over 6.6 billion mobile phone users worldwide, as of 2022, per Oberlo’s report. This number is rising every day and year.

5 Benefits of Smartphone Scanning

While smartphones are great for personal use, businesses, too, can make use of mobile devices. And smartphone scanning is one of the applications that boost productivity, reduce costs, and help cope with operation viability.

Let’s discuss the uses and benefits of smartphone scanning in detail:

1. The Ease of Mobility

While document scanners are helpful in many ways, they may not be time and cost-effective. For organizations that deal with a lot of data every day, having a document scanner allocated for each employee can be expensive.

The same applies to other recognition technologies, such as barcode scanning and OCR. A barcode reader may not cost as much as a top-grade document scanner, but a lot of money still has to be invested. 

Switching to smartphone scanning lets your employees use their smartphones as barcode readers or document scanners. This way, you won’t have to spend on purchasing additional equipment and give your workforce ease of mobility.

2. Enables Flexibility

Ever since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, most companies have started offering a remote or hybrid mode of work.

So, smartphone scanning becomes imperative if you have employees from different parts of the country or world. It allows them to share information on the go without having to reproduce anything on paper. This way, the staff collaboration improves as digital documents can be shared instantly.

3. Increased Productivity

As smartphone scanning reduces the dependency on manual data entry and paperwork, productivity is bound to increase.

Instead of spending hours collecting data manually, your workforce can spend time on other critical tasks. With automated data entry, the chances of errors are reduced. Hence, your employees won’t have to struggle rectifying mistakes.

4. Lesser Costs

Smartphone scanning allows you to utilize your employees’ mobile phones to let them perform tasks such as document scanning, barcode reading, and sharing information anywhere.

You don’t need to invest in purchasing dozens of handheld barcode scanners as you can either use a barcode web scanner or an app. Similarly, a mobile document scanning app lets you scan documents via smartphones.

5. Gives you an Edge Over your Competition

Be the trailblazer by choosing the digital way. Choosing smartphone scanning can let your business embark on its digital transformation journey, giving you an edge over your competitors.

Bid farewell to the hassle of managing bulky hardware and paper documents and provide your workforce with the freedom to perform crucial tasks from anywhere, anytime.

Despite the many benefits of smartphone scanning, most businesses still don’t opt for it. Hence, you can make the most of it while your competitors struggle with antiquated technologies and solutions.

Getting Started with Smartphone Scanning 

You can either use an off-the-shelf solution or build software on your own for implementing smartphone scanning into your business.

Developing your solution might sound challenging, but using minimal coding, you can easily find SDKs (software development kits) to embed barcode reading or document scanning functionality to a new or existing app. 

Features to Look for in a Document Scanner SDK for Mobile Web Capture 

While looking for a document scanner SDK for mobile web capture, there are certain features you must consider. We have listed the critical ones for you below. 

• Effortless Integration: Choosing a document scanner SDK for mobile web capture must save you time building an app from scratch. Hence, the document scanning SDK you choose must be easy to integrate. With a few lines of code, you should be able to add document scanning functionality into a web application for mobile devices.

• High Speed: Enterprise-grade document scanning SDKs support scanning thousands of documents in one session to help you save time and effort. Hence, opting for such a document scanner SDK is the best option.

• Editing Features: The document scanning SDK should offer basic editing features such as cropping, performing perspective correction, detecting the borders of the documents, etc. Instead of performing these features in a document editor, you should be able to do so within the scanner interface.

• Multiple Formats for Sharing and Saving: You should be able to save and share the documents scanned in different formats, such as PNG, JPEG, PDF, TIFF, and BMP. Thus, choose a document scanner SDK that supports multiple formats for saving and sharing.

• Image Cleanup & Enhancement: Inconsistent lighting and shadow may lead to poorly scanned images. Leading document scanning SDKs for web capture offer filters and features such as brightening for better results.

• Good Technical Support: Technical issues are inevitable. Hence, the vendor you choose should offer good technical support to help resolve your queries. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to fix issues and spend more time.

Features to Look for in a Web Barcode Scanner SDK 

A barcode scanner SDK allows you to integrate barcode scanning functionality into your app. While looking for a web barcode scanner SDK, you must consider the following features.

• Easy Integration: Just like the document scanner for mobile web capture, the barcode scanner API should also be easy to integrate. It should allow you to add barcode reading capability into your web app with a few lines of JavaScript code. Hence, you’ll save a lot of time and effort.

• Incredible Speed: You shouldn’t struggle with scanning a large number of barcodes in a short time. The top barcode scanner SDKs can read over 500 barcodes in 60 seconds! Consider choosing such options.

• Support Scanning Multiple Barcode Types: Choose a web barcode scanner SDK that supports reading linear and 2-dimensional barcode types such as PDF417, QR Codes, DataMatrix Codes, MaxiCode, Postal Codes, etc.

• Read Barcodes from PDFs, Images, and Live Streams: The web barcode scanner SDK you choose must be able to scan barcodes from live streams and images, and PDFs. This way, your workforce won’t have to switch between different devices.

• Ability to Decode Tough Barcodes: Challenging barcodes such as incomplete, angled, torn, crumpled, or distorted can give an ordinary barcode reader a tough time. Hence, choose the one that can scan such barcodes without any struggle.

• Good Technical Support: This applies to any technical product you purchase. Hence, a web barcode scanner SDK is no exception. Only choose a vendor that is known for good customer service.

When it comes to data capture SDKs, most vendors allow you to customize features per your business needs. This is why most companies prefer choosing an SDK over developing an application from scratch or opting for ready-to-use software.

SDKs help save your time and effort and cost less than building a solution from scratch. Also, check whether the vendor offers timely updates and upgrades as technology changes every day. To stay ahead of the curve, you must get access to advanced features from time to time. 

Whether for document scanning or barcode reading, you must also consider what all platforms the SDKs support. Go ahead with the ones that suit your business requirements. 

Bonus Tip! Make sure to try the free downloads and trials and compare different options. After trying every SDK, you can make an informed decision.