Today, most companies have an abundance of data that they do not use, yet it can uncover essential insights for improving business operations. On the other hand, leveraging massive amounts of incoming data is a challenge if your organization depends on the human workforce to handle such an uphill task.
The good news is that current technological advancements make it possible to scan, read, and understand paper and digital documents the same way humans do. Computer trained algorithms facilitate this procedure, and the technology behind it is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), which continues gaining popularity in various sectors.
What Is IDP?
As the name suggests, IDP is the process of intelligently capturing data and streamlining document processing activities. Whether you are processing unstructured, structured, long-form, or electronic documents, IDP’s goal is extracting information. Proper organization of data is paramount because information is at the heart of the workflow of any enterprise.
That implies that data capture solutions are a vital ingredient in your company’s success, and that is why the adoption of IDP becomes a game-changer for most organizations. IDP augments human understanding of unstructured data through such tools as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, machine learning (ML), and optical character recognition (OCR) at every stage of document data integration.
As such, IDP continues to gain widespread attention because it provides disruptive solutions to automate data extraction projects, which was previously difficult to achieve if not impossible.
How IDP works.
There are two things you need to take into consideration when deploying IDP. The first one is the ability to understand the technology needed to extract data from a document. That depends on the available information. Note that you need more advanced technology if you are dealing with unstructured or partially-structured data while the less sophisticated option will be ideal for structured data.
Secondly, you need to consider various forms of inflowing data. Organizations receive data in different formats, including emails and attachments, paper documents, faxes, and MS Office files like PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint, and Excel. Additionally, the information can come from various locations through devices like smartphones, desktops, and laptops.
Implementing IDP allows you to extract useful information, and integrating this resource into your workflow can yield maximum benefits. Cost-effectiveness is the other issue of concern in this case, and that is achievable through outsourcing. When you outsource your unstructured data to service providers, you receive organized information in return.
That allows you to allocate more time to the critical aspects of your organization’s operations. Essentially, IDP can recognize, classify, and extract distilled data and route it to the right document workflows for review purposes. Here are the three techniques you can apply to an IDP system.
Classification.
First and foremost, you need to classify the document you wish to process and establish where it starts and ends. That is the case because one document can be in the form of paper, while the other is an electronic one. OCR technology aids the classification procedure, and its creation is through machine learning algorithms.
Scanning of images and photographs and recognizing characters and symbols on a document are possible through OCR software. The software has the necessary training in almost 190 languages to facilitate the interpretation of the data it scans. Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), barcode recognition, and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) are the other recognition technologies in use.
Extraction.
The next step is extracting valuable information from a document. You can store information for future use or enter it in the right database after extraction. Pattern matching tools like Regex (Regular Expressions) power the data extraction procedure. That happens by identifying particular data in a document and presenting it in an easily accessible, digital format.
Some of the applications that can benefit to a large extent by using this technology include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.
Release.
Automatic export of images and information to business processes and workflows is the next step in the IDP procedure after extraction. The data will then be available for immediate consumption, and companies can use it to improve service delivery to customers and take action where necessary.
How to succeed with IDP.
Developing document data literacy is a necessity if you want to realize success with IDP platforms. The implication, in this case, is that you need to spend sufficient time seeking to understand the data at your disposal and the business outcomes relating to it before training software to integrate data.
Although this is logical, the tendency to skip this step is relatively high, and the cause may be mismatched expectations or marketing hype. If you want to realize document data literacy, you need to engage the subject matter experts who rely on in-house information to produce work.
The interpretation of the information on the documents that such individuals work with and an intimate understanding of the business value is not an option. The reason is that it helps you to extract the right data, and it also sheds light on what you should do with such information.
Also, a system-wide insight into what your data represents and how to use it results in improved workflows through business process redesign and intelligent automation.
IDP as a catalyst for transformation.
Change and disruption are at the center of IDP, and modern enterprises need a catalyst to advance. Data plays a significant role in the transformation of various entities. Finding new methods of analysis or gaining new sources of information helps companies discover valuable insights necessary to disrupt the industry they operate in through new inventions.
You also need to appreciate that data is an essential element when “going digital” and digital transformation leads to creating new operating models, value propositions, capabilities, and products. As such, data alone is the single most vital factor that attracts disruptive success.
Conclusion.
Provision of a stream of valuable information into software applications is how IDP augments the modern workforce. As a result, re-imagining how you work allows new workflows to become transformative enablers. When it comes to digital transformation, data is a dependable enabler. So, if you want to remain ahead of progress and innovation as an entrepreneur, you need to consider investing in IDP.