Leveraging data freshness and accuracy through AI OCR
“TSR, now in its 133rd year, continues to uphold traditional values even in an era
where information is widely accessible online. While TSR manages information
on 1.6 million companies annually, only a small percentage of that data can
be sourced from the web. The majority is gathered directly by TSR’s field
investigators stationed nationwide—one of TSR’s key strengths—who manually
transcribe real, on-site information,” said Mr. Kawahara, President & CEO.
“For us, data freshness is vital. To deliver truly valuable data, daily updates
are indispensable. Until recently, entering data into our systems from
financial statements—obtained as copies, PDFs, or photos—took significant
time. Our partnership with ABBYY substantially changed that; automatically
digitizing collected information has drastically reduced time and improved
data quality,” he said.
“Even in today’s environment, where various information can be accessed
online, we continue to deliver unique value by utilizing information gathered
firsthand from investigation sites. On the other hand, keeping pace with
technological advancements is also essential for TSR to enhance its
corporate value. While OCR itself is not a new technology, high hardware and
maintenance costs and low recognition accuracy had previously hindered
its full-scale use for documents like financial statements and real estate
registers. ABBYY’s AI OCR, however, offers both the benefits of cloud
services and outstanding recognition accuracy. These advantages are the
main reasons we adopted the solution,” said Mr. Tokiwa, Deputy General
Manager of the Services Division.
At TSR, documents obtained from investigation targets and external
information providers are used as inputs for corporate information research
and registration. Until now, the process of converting these documents
(paper, PDFs, images) into text and storing them as structured data required
manual labor, which posed challenges to operational efficiency. While some
OCR tools and outsourcing were previously used, the high cost of these
products meant that the return on investment (ROI) was not sufficient,
making it unfeasible for nationwide deployment.
ABBYY was proposed by IBM, which is responsible for the development
and maintenance of TSR’s database system. In light of the growing interest
in practical and commercial applications of generative AI, the solution was
selected for its proven global track record as part of a pilot to assess the
potential of AI OCR. This represented an advanced use case on global scale—
automating data extraction from unstructured documents with AI OCR to
address challenges in corporate information management.
