by Mitul Mehta, on Dec 20, 2021 6:49:03 PM
Estimated reading time: 3 mins
Automation is touted to be the solution for fueling the 21st century business economy. However, with paper and unstructured data being rampantly used across most cross-sections of society, it poses a serious impediment to conjuring up a hyperautomated enterprise and a society at large. With different entities in a value chain positioned at varying levels of automation maturity, the industry faces a dire need for an automation leveler. Intelligent Document Processing with its template-agnostic or template-free approach is just the solution for the world’s business economy that is on the cusp of transitioning from paper to hyperautomation. In our earlier blogs, we have already detailed out what is Intelligent Document Processing.
Challenges of a Template-based Intelligent Document Processing approach
There is no doubt that Intelligent Document Processing can accelerate an enterprise's digital transformation initiatives, but managing templates of various documents is a significant task by itself. For example, any large enterprise (retailer, consumer products, construction company, etc.) does business with over 50,000 suppliers, and they receive way over 500,000 invoices every month. To ensure that every invoice is accurately processed through the Intelligent Document Processing platform, the enterprise needs to create templates for each vendor invoice and update the template every time any of the 50,000 vendors changes the invoice format. It is a herculean task and requires the retailer to recruit an army of people to create and update templates to enable STP.
Following are some significant challenges of non-template-free Intelligent Document Processing solutions -
1. Manual maintenance of templates of every document type which significantly increases the time taken to process the document.
2. Reduced straight-through-processing levels.
3. More time is taken to onboard a vendor, partner, or employee.
4. Increased manual data entry errors.
What is template-free Intelligent Document Processing?
Intelligent Document Processing by its very nature requires very less to no customization or adjustment for processing a document. Once a document definition is set up, it is leveraged across many instances or documents. It allows to validate the document through eyeball verification and frees up the human resources and validators to meaningfully engage with customers. This template-free approach of Intelligent Document Processing makes it a useful tool for a paper workflow environment.
How is template-free Intelligent Document Processing a business enabler?
The template-free approach of Intelligent Document Processing allows the enterprise business users to process unstructured and semi-structured documents with ease and in batches. It extends the capabilities of Robotic Process Automation or RPA to process unstructured data along with structured. It thereby improves the processing speed and duration by a significant 10X times.
It identifies multiple document types in a single running multi-page document, including KYC form, PAN number, social security number, etc., and automatically splits it into single pages along with classification. This approach speeds up the document processing cycle and eliminates continuous manual intervention.
Intelligent Document Processing has pre-processing and post-processing features for optimizing document image processing. They improve the accuracy of data capture. Pre-built AI / ML models support document processing through continuous learning during exception handling. They augment the template-free approach and accelerate the straight-through processing or STP.
Intelligent Document Processing – Benefits of the template-free approach
AI/ML-powered Intelligent Document Processing makes a significant difference to a paper workflow environment –
- Accelerated onboarding and optimized processing from days to minutes
- Increased productivity and efficiency across the enterprise
- A scalable environment for document processing
- Smarter output over time through continuous learning
- Freeing up time for creating and maintaining templates
- A higher degree of data extraction accuracy with unstructured and semi-structured documents
- Processing of hand-written documents with a fair degree of accuracy
- Higher degrees of information visibility and accountability
- Faster and better decision making even with paper-based workflows
- Improved viability of insights generation and information usage from paper documents
- Speedy integration of unstructured data from documents in the enterprise workflows
- Improved responsiveness of enterprises to their customers
- Better employee engagement, faster TAT, and improved customer satisfaction
- Improved compliance and reduced risk exposure even with high document volumes
- Process optimization while being an important part of multiple value chains
Intelligent Document Processing – Prominent use cases
Here are some very important use cases that allow you to augment your business processes and optimize operations –
- Extract data from unstructured documents, such as invoices and purchase orders, and integrate with ERP systems.
- Capture data from EXIM documents and integrate with core trade finance systems and enterprise ERP systems.
- Ingest data from know your customer documents and expedite onboarding of vendors, customers, employees, etc.
- Extract data from paper supportings as well as PDFs in unstructured format and feed in fraud detection and anti-money laundering engines.
- Automatically capture data from claim processing documents and incorporate the details in a structured format in the core insurance systems.
More Intelligent Document Processing or IDP use cases >>
Simply put
Intelligent Document Processing is an important automation leveler in a paper workflow environment. It extracts the data from unstructured documents and integrates it in the enterprise systems in a structured format. While working with different entities in a value chain at different levels of automation maturity, the template-free approach of Intelligent Document Processing speeds up data extraction as well as integration and acts as a great leveler in the hyperautomated business environment.
