A Sydney-developed optical character recognition (OCR) application has been picked up by Ricoh for regional distribution across Asia Pacific.

The application, ESA TransFormer, was developed by Ricoh Australia’s in-house team, based in the company’s Printing Innovation Centre, to create a low-cost, MFD-based OCR program.

Since its launch three years ago, ESA TransFormer has been popular with customers of all sizes due to its functionality and affordability when compared to seat-based OCR products.

"Our regional head office in Singapore was impressed with ESA TransFormer’s success in Australia and has since picked it up for distribution across Asia Pacific," said Kathy Wilson, General Manager of Business Solutions for Ricoh Australia.

"It’s exciting to see a locally-developed product receive recognition and expand Ricoh’s regional offering.'

"Our developer team – the Business Solutions Group – is an investment in Australian innovation. They are constantly collaborating with clients and local third party companies to create solutions to every day business challenges," she said.

ESA TransFormer is a simple to use application that is available for Ricoh multifunctional devices and converts scanned documents into editable formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel or searchable PDF.

The latest upgrade of the application features enhancements including multiple language support for the Asian market, improved OCR engine, support for 64 bit operating systems and support for industry standard archiving formats such as PDF/A and JPEG 2000.