Intelligent document processing (IDP) augments human understanding of unstructured data with data science tools like computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing. IDP applies further advancements such as AI and machine learning to intelligently capture the exact data the user wants. It uses and goes beyond the fundamental principles of optical character recognition (OCR).
Here are five important business values of IDP:
1. Time saved: IDP can reduce the time it takes to extract information from a document by up to 80%. For example, a user takes approximately three hours each quarter to manually extract data from an investor report. With IDP, this same task takes just minutes. The best part of IDP is that it provides the business user an interactive and easy-to-use interface that displays data captured from these documents and any data points that need verifying or editing. Rather than the user having to sift through each and every single page to find the data they need, IDP can do it in mere seconds.
2. Ease of use: Most IDP tools do not require a data scientist; trained business users can automate their document types. IDP maker ABBYY has released ABBYY Vantage, which provides flexibility and ease of use to train certain use cases without extensive development. The company offers pretrained models and drag-and-drop functionality with no coding required.
3. Increase in process capacity: IDP allows companies to scale critical processes without having to increase employee headcount or other costs. Eliminating tedious tasks from employees’ workload frees them up for more meaningful work and increases job satisfaction.
4. Less data needed: Many are under the mistaken impression that IDP requires a huge number of samples. In reality, the training data required for IDP depends on the use case. If we are looking at invoices, then a small number of samples is all that is required. When dealing with legal contracts and many paragraphs of content, then, yes, a bigger sample set is required. If large sample sets can be given, it will help provide even better accuracy.
5. Reduced demand on HR: Rather than business users needing to spend hours extracting and pulling repetitive information out of documents, IDP can take on this menial work and let business get back to work on meaningful tasks.
Greater Efficiency with Automation
Organisations need to start harnessing the power of IDP to increase efficiency and decrease human errors in their document processing. By doing so, it gives business users more time to focus on higher value tasks and organizational goals. Recent development in machine learning had led to some critical breakthroughs for intelligent automation.
Historically, automation has been constrained by its lack of reasoning and critical thought that is needed for reading a document. Humans are quick to recognize different types of documents, comprehend their meaning, and make appropriate decisions.
Today, IDP software can quickly read, comprehend and process documents much like a human would. This makes it a significant accelerator to maximizing automation benefits.
ISG helps enterprises understand the quickly changing IDP market and make smart investments toward their automation goals. Contact us to learn more.
