As an IT leader, you’re constantly looking for ways to make your organisation more efficient, more insightful, and more automated. You’re also charged with guiding digital transformation. One area ripe for improvement in most businesses? Document processing. Extracting data from documents is still predominantly manual at many companies. Employees spend countless hours entering data from forms, invoices, contracts, claims and other documents. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and prone to errors.
But what if you could automate document processing with artificial intelligence? Imagine software that could “read” and extract relevant data from documents, regardless of format, with high accuracy. This technology exists – it’s called intelligent document processing (IDP). IDP uses machine learning and natural language processing to classify documents and pull out text, data, and insights.
The Benefits for Your Business
Implementing an IDP system brings tremendous benefits:
- Speed – Documents are processed almost instantly without human involvement
- Accuracy – AI far surpasses human data entry accuracy, reducing errors
- Efficiency – Your employees are freed from repetitive manual tasks to focus on higher value work
- Insights – Uncover trends and analytics from large volumes of unstructured documents
- Cost Savings – No more paying high costs for manual document processing
- Compliance – IDP systems provide auditable data trails required for regulated industries
- Scalability – Easily scale document processing as your business grows
Quick Implementation in Your Environment
The best part? You can implement IDP rapidly by following these steps:
- Identify your most document-intensive processes that lack automation. Common candidates: new customer onboarding, claims processing, HR/recruiting, legal/contracts.
- Select an IDP vendor offering out-of-the-box solutions for your use case. Leading options include Google Cloud Document AI, AWS Textract, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, IBM Watson Discovery, and more.
- Work with the vendor on integration. A vendor-supplied API can often connect the IDP software with your existing apps and databases.
- Develop a pilot programme. Run a small batch of docs through the system and assess accuracy before full rollout.
- Gradually expand the IDP solution across departments. Prioritise high-value use cases first.
- Measure progress with KPIs. Track productivity gains, cycle time reduction, cost savings, and other metrics.
Within a few weeks, your department can be running an IDP pilot. Within 2-3 months, full production rollout can be achieved.
Competitive Differentiation for Your Company
Document processing is often ignored when companies embark on digital transformation. Yet it presents one of the greatest opportunities to drive immediate automation benefits. By taking the lead on evaluating and implementing IDP, you position your IT department as an innovator. Your company gains a competitive edge from faster, smarter document processing. Join the pioneers automating this manual bottleneck with the power of AI. The use cases across your business are endless – but the starting point is simple.