CXOs are stepping up their digital transformation initiatives for greater adaptability to market shifts. They also want to ensure that they pursue innovation agendas and outperform their competitors. Enterprises today realize that they can only enable innovation and increase their market responsiveness with optimized processes and innovative solutions. The importance of scalable, intelligent solutions that optimize processes and make them more accurate and efficient cannot be overstated.
As data becomes invaluable in today’s world, most processes depend on information. However, managing, capturing, and interpreting enterprise documents impedes progress. Often this activity becomes effort-intensive, error-prone, and expensive. Automating the data-capturing process therefore is a strategic priority as it is an enabler of digital transformation initiatives. This is where Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) comes to the rescue.
What is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)?
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solves some of the pressing enterprise challenges surrounding document management. IDP can extract and interpret printed or handwritten text from digital images of physical documents.
With IDP, enterprises embarking on their digital transformation journeys can convert documents like PDF files or scanned hard-copy images into searchable data records. Accurate digitization of these records, files, and documents allows enterprises to use technology to connect and convert semi-structured or unstructured data into structures that are suited for AI and ML algorithms.
Why is IDP Important for Digital Transformation?
Digitizing content forms the core of robust digital transformation strategies. Enterprises have numerous data assets that contain information that can enhance business value and performance. This information can also identify inefficient processes.
However, it is hard for enterprises to glean impactful insights when the information is trapped in hard-to-use sources such as paper or non-machine readable data formats.
Next-generation Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) allows CXOs to drive their digital transformation agendas by allowing them to extract information at scale. It transforms their documents into structured and easily accessed content.
IDP allows enterprises to capture data from electronic formats like PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets to analog and paper-based documents.
6 Benefits of IDP During Digital Transformation
As digital technologies evolve and transform, document digitization has to go beyond capturing data from documents. Technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) turn scanned images into text. IDP does more than just capture the data from documents. With this technology, enterprises can extract, categorize, and also export relevant data for further processing using AI.
Some of the key benefits of using IDP during digital transformation are:
- Greater efficiency, higher accuracy
Manual document processing slows down digital transformation initiatives. They can often be prone to errors and are more expensive. The average simple manual processing cost goes upwards of $40 for complex documents. The range of human errors involved in manual processing ranges between 2%-3%.
Along with this, manual document processing also has a huge productivity impact. Enterprises end up employing valuable resource time in manual document processing instead of focusing on high-value tasks.
In industries that are document-heavy such as banking and finance, insurance, etc. the cost of manual document processing and the associated risks can easily add up. However, with IDP enterprises can speed up business processes and operational efficiencies and convert large quantities of semi-structured data into a structured form with ease and agility.
The process reduces the time to find specific records, ensures that the information is accurate, and improves enterprise process efficiency.
- Improved exception handling
Enterprises embarking on digital transformation journeys want to create more dynamic and comprehensive processes. However, some processes, such as invoicing, or security systems need to be designed to handle exceptions.
Exception handling is an aspect that is well-suited for IDP. IDP systems can be trained to navigate this enterprise challenge and flag errors or inconsistent information. With such a system, enterprises can identify issues and errors, fraudulent information, etc., and re-routed for human intervention faster.
This accelerates the digital transformation and ensures greater and improved process efficiency and output.
- Elevated compliance and security
IDP systems enable enterprises to navigate the compliance and security landscape as well. Since IDP systems offer high accuracy rates it becomes perfect for compliance-related documents. These systems are also well suited for documents that contain sensitive information such as health records or personally identifiable information (PII).
Since IDP relies on automation and not human intervention, enterprises can be assured that outside parties do not gain access to sensitive information. The precision of these systems also makes them well-suited to streamline and increase the accuracy of regulatory reporting as well.
- Elevate data accuracy and usability
Data accuracy and enhanced data usability are significant contributors to digital transformation success. The NLP techniques, such as dependency graph extraction, word embeddings, term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), etc. allow enterprises to increase data accuracy.
The technologies at work in IDP help enterprises unlock value from dark data. They can retrieve information from different types of content within the reports, including paragraphs and tables. IDP systems transform dark data into structured, high-quality, data which is primed for analysis. This allows enterprises to create a wide data landscape that enables enterprises to enhance their data evaluation and analytics capabilities.
- Scale automation fast
IDP also drives digital transformation by enabling enterprises to automate and scale automation initiatives. Comprehensive IDC systems are integration-friendly, non-invasive, and widely applicable across industries and a multitude of business functions.
Enterprises can effectively extract data, give it a structured form and drive end-to-end automation. IDP optimizes the data for RPA and AI initiatives and also allows enterprises to tie it to different processes, and various systems that automate key processes. In many cases, IDP becomes a key technology to achieve Hyperautomation by delivering structured and high-quality data.
- Improved BI and Analytics
Business intelligence and advanced analytical abilities are crucial for enterprise fortunes. One of the key reasons for CXOs to digitally transform also stems from the need to gain greater intelligence.
IDP allows enterprises to uncover topic-specific documents and allows them to gain deeper and clearer business intelligence and analytics by capably extracting complex information.
In Conclusion
Since data is a significant enabler of digital transformation, IDP becomes invaluable in the digital transformation journey. IDP solutions support a wide variety of document processing needs and ensure that enterprises can extract this data intelligently, with lesser effort and higher accuracy.
Connect with us to see how we can help you with your IDP agenda.
