Many times we end up scanning documents that customers send to us in response to our Audit Information Request.  The scanned documents are much more useful when they have been OCR-ed (Optical Character Reader) because then it is possible to search for words and terminology.  The OCR process is one more step in Acrobat and so when we run out of time, the documents do not get OCR-ed.

Adobe provides batch processing in many of its applications.  I found it in Acrobat Professional (in the title menu under Advanced).  You can define actions, in this case to OCR all the pdfs found in a folder (you specify).  Not only will it perform the action, but then you can define where it saves the new files and if you want it to rename the files (like “OriginalFileName-OCR”) attaching “-OCR.”

There are several pre-defined batches as well as the options to build your own.  Automating redundant tasks will save you time.