Intelligent document processing involves the use of various technologies to extract data from unstructured documents. In fact, technologies include optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML). Unstructured documents can be in various formats, including PDFs, emails, and images.
Normally, the business landscape is evolving at a rapid pace in the current era of digital transformation. What is more, the amount of data that businesses generate has exploded. Companies are constantly on the lookout for ways to manage this data efficiently. One area that has been gaining traction in recent years is intelligent document processing (IDP). IDP is a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the processing of documents.
That’s why, it not only saves time and reduces errors, but it also helps to streamline business processes and increase efficiency. With IDP, organizations can automate mundane, repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value activities that require human intervention. In this article, we will explore the benefits of intelligent document processing. We take a look at how it can help businesses to gain a competitive advantage.
Executive Summary
Deloitte recently conducted a survey on intelligent automation, where executives evaluated their automation initiatives against those of the “ideal organization.” The results indicated that in 2021-2022, the average rating was 5.04 out of 10. This implies that almost half of the respondents believed their organizations fell short of the ideal by 50%.
Survey findings
To begin with, Deloitte conducted a survey of how people in the United States and the world perceive government digital services. Some of the key findings were quite surprising. Below are a few highlights from the United States survey that I found interesting.
- Only 23 percent of U.S. respondents regularly (always/often) interact with government through digital channels.
- Fifty percent of respondents interact with a website and 28 percent prefer face-to-face interactions.
- The biggest challenges are user experience, privacy, and security (all of which are solvable from your solutions).
- Respondents happy with digital services also tend to rate the agency as being highly trustworthy in protecting their personal data. Better customer experience = more trust in government.
- There is a lot more work to do when it comes to the digital divide and digital equity. COVID-19 highlighted how unprepared governments race to bridge this divide. The shift to digital is easy for some, and more difficult for others.
To tell the truth, businesses still have a significant amount of work to do to fully mature their process automation initiatives. However, the good news is that many business processes, particularly document processing, can benefit from automation’s efficiencies. Intelligent document processing (IDP) can streamline business processes. It can relay information, and organize unstructured data every time a document enters a business process.
This guide aims to help business leaders find the appropriate intelligent document processing solution. This helps to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. With the right intelligent automation solution in place, organizations can focus on their core priorities. Naturally, improving customer experience, reducing operating costs and risks, and enhancing operational agility.
Intelligent Document Processing Key Insights
According to recent key insights,
- In all honesty, CEOs focus on boosting their organizational agility by accelerating their digital transformation efforts.
- Current automation initiatives are facing difficulties in automating essential business processes. To tell the truth, those that rely on unstructured document formats, such as PDFs. These comprise almost 80% of an enterprise’s data stack.
- Intelligent document processing (IDP) technology empowers organizations by providing them with machine learning capabilities. Accordingly, that improve productivity, efficiency, and real-time decision-making based on accurate information.
3 Reasons to Prioritize Automation in Intelligent Document Processing
Firstly, legacy technologies and manual workflows can create bottlenecks that hinder downstream processes. Naturally, leading to strained systems, overburdened employees, and dissatisfied customers waiting for answers.
Secondly, the use of outdated legacy technology and manual processes is widespread across data-driven industries. Normally, where processing millions of medical and insurance claims, loan applications, and other information is essential each day.
However, due to concerns about a possible economic downturn, executives are becoming more cautious about investing in automation. CFOs are playing an active role in technology purchasing decisions. Based on Forrester’s findings, intelligent document extraction has the highest value proposition. For the purpose of implementation, license, subscription, and maintenance costs.
Among various process automation options, intelligent document processing (IDP) is particularly appealing. Naturally due to its documented use cases, short time-to-value, and consistent ROI. Here are three reasons why companies are turning to IDP.
- Improve Customer Satisfaction
- Reduce Costs and Risks
- Drive Revenue Growth
Improve Customer Satisfaction
As a matter of fact, manual processes that are slow and prone to errors can have a negative impact on the customer journey. If your organization takes weeks to process car insurance or mortgage applications, you risk losing customers. Naturally competitors can offer faster, more responsive systems. Intelligent automation can increase document processing speed. Consequently, resulting in better and faster customer experiences that reduce churn and improve customer lifetime value.
41% of policyholders face issues with their insurers state they are likely or very likely to switch to another provider. Normally, due to a lack of digital capabilities.
Reduced Costs & Risks
In the first place, every time a manual touch-point is involved, there’s an increased risk of errors. As a matter of fact, organizations can reduce the overhead costs associated with manual data entry by using intelligent document processing.
Naturally organizations can reduce clerical errors by up to 67%. On the condition they leverage machines that are skilled in data processing and manipulation. Consequently, avoid the time and expenses involved in fixing them downstream.
Conversely, unlike traditional OCR solutions and RPA, machine learning-powered solutions have the ability to learn from their errors. Naturally this leads to more efficient and automated processes over time.
Increased Revenue Growth
Intelligent automation can simplify business operations, eliminate manual workarounds, and replace outdated legacy technology. Therefore, freeing up resources that can be invested in developing innovative products and services to drive the business forward.
According to Gartner, automating back-office operations is where CEOs and CFOs see the greatest opportunity for efficiency gains.
Limitations of Current Automation Approaches
Many organizations prioritize resilience and scalability. Naturally this provides a competitive edge and safeguard against unforeseen market changes, by undergoing digital transformation.
One common starting point for this journey is implementing RPA software, which can assist with automation to a certain extent.
However, as business processes become more intricate and expansive, they require continued investment and maintenance. They only yield incremental automation improvements.
Often, this is due to a misconception of RPA’s capabilities. Companies invest in RPA without recognizing the need for personnel. Consequently to oversee and manage the bots, screens, and systems that each automation point interacts with.
As a result, without proper supervision, the process breaks. Most initiatives remain limited to automating specific tasks and fail to meet the expectations for automation at scale.
Current automation approaches are inadequate for empowering businesses to expedite digital transformation in times of need.
This is where intelligent document processing can offer a solution.
The Document Processing Automation Landscape
With the abundance of automation solutions available in the market, it can be challenging to identify a suitable solution. That benefits your organization and its workforce.
To harness the potential of intelligent automation, business leaders must prioritize AI solutions that integrate. Leaders must optimize vital business processes in the present while also facilitating adaptability. For the purpose of more complicated and distinctive workflows and processes in the future.
To initiate your assessment, we will delve into three of the most prevalent automation solutions for document-oriented processes below:
Intelligent Document Processing
IDP software captures data from documents (e.g. text, PDFs, scanned images, emails). The solution categorizes and extracts relevant data for further processing using artificial intelligence.
Apply When:
- You want to process volumes of documents with greater speed and accuracy than OCR
- You need to process more complex documents, such as low quality mobile captures or those that include messy handwriting
- You want to provide non-technical business users with new skills
Be Mindful When:
- IDP vendors claim 100% automation or accuracy out of the box
- Vendors won’t discuss their underlying technology or allow you to test their offering in the real world
- Vendor offerings don’t account for human input. Look for an IDP solution designed for seamless human-machine collaboration. It must have built-in quality checks that learns over time and has a friendly UI
Optical Character Recognition
OCR converts scanned images into machine-encoded text, typically transcribing it character by character. It uses rules or template-based extraction, which requires users to train the system for each template type.
Apply When:
- You have standard, high quality documents to transcribe. Example: machine-printed text, consistent handwriting in boxes, fields for extraction in the same location across pages
Be Mindful When:
- Processing documents with handwriting or documents with poor image quality (scan lines, low resolution, etc…)
- Handling documents with unstructured layouts or documents that are highly variable in nature, such as invoices
- Adding new use cases, which can take several weeks (or longer) depending on complexity
Robotic Process Automation
RPA provisions software agents known as “bots” to imitate human interactions with software systems. Also complete repetitive tasks, and act either in concert with humans (attended RPA) or mostly autonomously (unattended RPA).
Apply When:
- You have structured, text-based inputs and outputs with clearly defined, repeatable manual steps to execute a particular business application
- You have simple to moderately complex processes that are stable, mature, and documented
Be Mindful When:
- You’re dealing with unstructured document data, such as images and PDFs. RPA relies on complementary technologies to classify and extract data from documents
- You want to automate more complex workflows. RPA automates processes as they exist today without taking into account whether the underlying process is flawed
- You wish to avoid add-on services like implementation or tying up resources in ongoing technical maintenance
Choosing the Right Intelligent Document Processing Solution: What to Prioritize?
As businesses rely increasingly on digital data and documentation, the necessity for IDP solutions has become apparent. However, not all IDP solutions are equal, and companies should prioritize their preferences when selecting the right solution.
As a prominent provider of IDP solutions, codemantra takes the following priorities into account. We offer businesses a reliable and effective solution.
Accuracy
Accuracy is the top priority, as any inaccuracies during data extraction could result in significant consequences. The affected face wrongfully denied claims or delayed payouts. For businesses, an accurate IDP platform is critical to cost reduction, compliance assurance, efficiency improvement, and customer satisfaction.
codemantra’s unique approach prioritizes data extraction accuracy; our proprietary ML automates against them. ML models can comprehend human language and can recognize a wide variety of document formats. This enables higher levels of automation while maintaining accuracy levels of over 99% in both unstructured and semi-structured documents.
Ease of Use
Ease of use is a key priority when searching for an IDP platform. As a consequence, it increase employee productivity, minimize training time, reduce errors, enhance efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.
codemantra adopts an AI-centric approach to digital transformation. As a result the robust offering is easy to deploy. Furthermore, an intuitive UI with low administrative overheads, results in rapid return on investment without the need for technical teams.
Reimagine Digital Document Processing with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The current business landscape requires a more advanced solution that can address the complexities of modern-day processes. IDP offers precisely that, to say nothing of multiple document types, extracts data, and minimal requirement for manual data entry. That’s why, it represents the future of document processing. Naturally it offers businesses a smarter, more efficient, and cost-effective approach to manage their document processing requirements.
Regarding IDP, codemantra is the most adaptable intelligent automation platform for digital document processing. The company’s primary offering accessibilityInsight™, automates digital document processing. In addition, it identifies and extracts a document’s structure to achieve compliance with accessibility standards. We enable organizations to enhance customer satisfaction, increase revenue growth, and reduce costs.
Digital files in various formats have to meet federal accessibility standards like ADA and WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines. Additionally, accessibility standards requires a robust, scalable solution. With this in mind, codemantra’s accessibilityInsight converts print PDFs into accessible versions. The output meets the latest accessibility and compliance regulations like PDF/UA and WCAG guidelines.
accessibilityInsight™ is an AI-powered platform that automates digital document accessibility compliance. It captures, classifies, and extracts data from documents. Finally, transforms documents to any desired digital format to achieve compliance with accessibility standards.
codemantra Helps Businesses Improve Digital Document Accessibility with AI-Powered Platform
Promoting Inclusivity with Accessible Digital Content
The importance of document accessibility has increased significantly over the last decade. Documents need to be accessible to promote inclusivity and for the content to reach a wider audience. In 2008, individuals and organizations drafted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. With the intention to provide a shared standard on making digital content more accessible to people with disabilities.
codemantra is an intelligent document processing (IDP) company that helps businesses promote accessibility through digital transformation. As a matter of fact, the AI-driven solution automates digital document processing.
Decoding Document Details Similar to the Human Eye
The accessibilityInsight™ platform includes three solutions. AccessibilityCheck is used for robust accessibility compliance reporting and accessibilityFix is used to remediate PDFs for compliance. Thirdly, accessibilityReview, allows companies to perform validation across all document types. As well as, comply with WCAG 2.1 standards, report on document accessibility levels. In addition review and perform interactive remediation as needed.
The accessibilityInsight™ platform derives structure and intelligence from documents using a two-pronged approach. As a matter of fact, it models on how the human eye generates visual images of a document. And so, pass on to the brain to decode information.
That’s why, accessibilityInsight™ contains an image processing module to generate the visuals. Firstly, it works in tandem with the AI-based core engine. Next the ML model extracts document structure. Subsequently, it transforms the document into a format that is compliant with accessibility standards.
Scaling to Process Large Documents
codemantra has been extensively working to scale its platform to process large volumes accurately. We are successfully able to scale document extraction for several hundred pages and reduce turnaround time.
Cuts Document Processing Time by 95%
A 1,000-page document takes 167 minutes with the threat of timing out during processing. As a matter of fact, the same job takes just 7 minutes. To tell the truth, timeouts are no longer an issue. Consequently, there is no limit to the number of pages that can be processed simultaneously.
This has proven practical for the digitization of vast backlists of academic publications at pace. In July 2021, codemantra converts 12,000 archived pages to accessible form for the University of Westminster. The turnaround time is within 8 days.
Ensures Data Security and Compliance
Since launching accessibilityInsight™, codemantra has served many customers from the public sector, particularly universities and government agencies. In the first place, we emphasize data security and compliance on a product and a strategic level. Additionally, codemantra is SOC 2 compliant and ISO certified for quality management.
About codemantra
codemantra is an intelligent document processing company that leverages artificial intelligence to automate workflows and achieve digital accessibility compliance. It serves more than 300 public and private sector customers across the globe.
Benefits
- Cuts processing time for a 1,000-page document by 95%
- Halves processing cost per document
- Accelerates pace of innovation
- Complies with SOC 2 and several ISO standards
- Quickly iterates ML models
- Increases document throughput
Cost-saving digital content creation for LMS platform
Challenge
- Transforming existing courses in three different formats to be compatible with the school district’s LMS platform.
- The subject-wise courses (Math, English, Social Studies, Science, Health/Personal Fitness) comprise of assessments, assignments, discussion boards, presentation slides, etc.
- Granular search using keywords was difficult due to due to lack of enriched metadata descriptions.
Solution
- Using codemantra’s Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) platform and workflow management the existing course materials were converted into LMS-ready SCORM packages.
- Math and science courses with equations and formulae tagged appropriately. Hence given accurate auto-generated descriptions reviewed by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
- The final output was incorporated with the metadata specifications provided by the client and exported into the digital learning environment.
Results
- 30% cost savings compared with in-house solutions
- 30% decrease in costs compared to traditional textbook acquisitions
- Metadata tagging enabled granular search and navigation of data
Impact
- E-learning module is accessible on multiple devices – desktop, laptop, or mobile
- Intuitive user interface enhances remote learning for students and teachers with special needs
- Course customization and interoperability across different workflows elevates teaching and enhances student performance
For more information about our IDP solutions and offerings: Get in touch: engage@codemantra.com
