For many businesses, especially large organisations that process high volumes of data daily, using data extraction software that is efficient and scalable is essential. Many of Xtracta’s clients process an excess of 200,000 documents through our platform each month. If you whittle that down to the number of documents captured per working day, with 21 working days per month—that’s roughly 10,000 documents per day.
For businesses that process documents at high volumes like this, it’s vital that the software can scale to meet processing demand. Here, we discuss the importance of this concept and demonstrate how Xtracta meets these expectations.
The Need for Scalable Software Solutions
The scalability of a business is very much linked to the scalability of the systems it uses. For example, having a scalable database is especially important, because if an organisation’s workload continues to grow, its database needs to follow suit to meet demand.
For a business’ database system to be scalable, it needs to have the capacity to perform additional work, through greater hardware resources such as additional servers, processors, memory, and storage.
However, for many companies, the data capture software they use is designed to run on a single computer or single server. Just as a single warehouse can handle and distribute only so many orders, a single server also has its limitations. Organisations that run on a single server may not be scalable enough to handle the processing of high volumes of data. Furthermore, if a single point of failure were to occur and the system goes down, the whole process is stopped.
Additionally, if the software used can’t scale efficiently, a large backlog of data can start to build up, causing major processing delays and other complications that impede a businesses’ ability to scale.
The Importance of Scalable Software in Business
When thinking about the importance of scalable software in business, important factors to consider include a software’s ability to process data in a timely fashion and its ability to continue to operate during failures. Additionally, the software should have scalable solutions that cater to the unique industry needs of the business. To clarify, scalable software should:
1. Be able to process data in a timely fashion & continue to operate during failures
No matter the software or system a business uses, it’s inevitable that failures or errors will happen from time to time. Computer equipment may break, or servers crash, and without redundant systems, these failures can cause at minimum a hassle, and in more severe cases, a complete stoppage to a critical business process.
When these failures occur—as they inevitably will—the last thing a company wants is for its entire system to stop processing. Therefore, having systems that can process efficiently and that will continue to operate during these failures is what makes all the difference between a company’s ability to scale being stunted by internal setbacks or being strengthened by its resilience.
2. Provide scalable solutions that are adaptable to the industry
A lot of data capture software is built specifically for certain use cases (e.g., to cater to general processes used across industries). For example, general processing software may be able to process up to five different types of documents, such as emails, business reports, transactional documents, letters, and financial reports—but it may not be able to cater to documents unique to an industry.
To increase a company’s ability to scale, it is important that the systems it uses can process and generate readable data for not only general documents but document types that are unique to the business as well. As an example, let’s look at the processing needs of businesses in logistics and healthcare industries:
- Logistics Industry. Within logistics, streamlining processes may include automating tasks such as processing freight operations, tracking, documentation, and certificates that go alongside shipments that travel across international water (e.g., a certificate for agricultural goods or dangerous goods).
- Healthcare industry. In the healthcare industry, besides processing general documents such as invoices, there is also a need to process industry-specific documents such as medical records, medication charts, handover sheets, patient assessment forms, and test results.
Instead of using a rigid data capture system that only caters to certain document types and formats, data extraction software and OCR solutions like Xtracta can meet both the general and industry-specific needs of a company. Furthermore, when volumes of incoming documents for a business change suddenly, Xtracta can easily scale to meet demand.
The Benefit of a Multi-Tenant System
For businesses looking for scalable solutions, Xtracta’s multi-tenant system offers a range of benefits to consider. While a single-tenant system is one where a single instance of software and infrastructure solely serves one customer (a.k.a., a ‘tenant’), a multi-tenant system is one where a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure, serves multiple clients (all of whom share a single database).
In a multi-tenant environment, while tenant’s data is run through the same servers, their data is segregated through the design of the application. This means that tenants can tap into the same data storage and hardware, but they only have access to their own data and all other data in the system is isolated and remains invisible.
Xtracta’s Public Cloud
At Xtracta, our multi-tenant public cloud is how most clients use our software. This multi-tenant infrastructure enables us to scale our processing capacity significantly to meet high customer demand.
By using software that is designed to scale, businesses gain access to many different servers that can process their documents. This means that very high volumes of data—even dozens of documents per second—can be processed through Xtracta’s servers efficiently at any one time.
Through our public cloud, companies don’t need to worry about the drawbacks of a single server design that—when experiencing a failure—stops business production entirely.
Failures are bound to happen sometimes, but because of Xtracta’s multi-server architecture, if a failure does occur, it doesn’t cause any issues. If any one of the servers in our public cloud were to fail, the system can carry on and continue processing without a problem.
Scale your business today with data extraction software from Xtracta
Xtracta’s receipt, contract, and invoice OCR software are designed for seamless integration into your company’s existing software. Furthermore, through integrating their software with Xtracta’s public (or private) cloud, a company can centralise management through a single platform that meets most of their needs.
If you’re interested in discovering how Xtracta’s receipt OCR and data capture technology can increase your company’s scalability and growth, get in touch with our team of experts today.
