The amount of data generated within a corporate organization is so huge that it is humanly impossible to derive insights from all data points. One of the major bottlenecks faced by businesses in this sense is the affinity for organizations to capture and store data in easy-to-interpret formats.  Studies estimate that 80% of data generated globally will be unstructured and 90 percent of unstructured data never generates any value and lies wasted across the enterprise.

A big chunk of this unstructured data is stored away as documents across systems. A major challenge that plagues decision-makers is the ability to filter out valuable information from this documented data. The ideal solution was to first digitize documents so that it becomes easier to filter out the noise and information having real value for the business.

For years, Optical Character Recognition, or OCR has been the de facto approach for organizations to digitize text from documents. But with the scale of data generated today, there is a pressing need for more advanced technology to help with uncovering insights from textual documents. When Robotic Process Automation (RPA) came into the spotlight, enterprises had a really good tool in the form of RPA bots that could extract information via OCR and carry it to other relevant systems. However, there were limitations that RPA bots could not surpass. Verification of complex information and autonomous decision-making based on extracted data were all still far away from the arms of RPA to reach.

This is where Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) became a key asset for enterprises as it propelled data extraction into a dimension beyond what bots and OCR could achieve.

What is Intelligent Document Processing?

In simple terms, IDP refers to technology that can easily extract information from textual documents, separate meaningful information from unstructured data, and make it accessible to other systems for further analysis. It employs the same scanning approach for data identification but uses a combination of computer vision, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and heuristics to deduce information from the textual document. It can autonomously validate the extracted data thereby eliminating a number of steps in the usual OCR-driven and RPA bot-based approach.

The beauty of IDP is that it can accommodate data extraction and transformation tasks across large streams of data, unlike traditional OCR which has file-specific processing bandwidth.

How can IDP transform business operations?

With IDP, businesses get to embrace a new wave of aggregating and making sense of data stored away in siloes across documents archived in thousands of storage folders. There are several possibilities that open up for businesses to really streamline their operations and drive more value from their enterprise data. Let us explore the major benefits of IDP in today’s business operations:

• Improved Accuracy

With the help of heuristics and algorithm-driven processing, IDP is guaranteed to be far more accurate in deriving the exact data insight from documents. It verifies the text with the right context to ensure that every word is genuinely deciphered for its meaning and no errors are made in subsequent processing or storage of extracted data.

• Lower Operational Cost

With IDP, manual effort can be significantly reduced. In the long run, it allows enterprises to focus their hiring efforts on skills that are core to the business. In the past, they had to continuously hire and maintain a large team for administrative tasks like data processing from documents. Besides, the ability of IDP to minimize errors ensures that there is no need for repetition of mundane task processes resulting in saved labor as well. From hiring to maintaining a large team, the cost involved is significant. IDP gradually reduces this cost agent from the business's balance sheet.

• Enforce Compliance

Manual updating and processing of data from documents often need to be corrected for errors. Additionally, there may be biased entries as well. This is not a good sign for the business. They need to maintain strict compliance with information processing. Strict adherence to standards in data management must be applied to the digitized data. This is possible when IDP is used. The extracted data can be organized and stored in the desired format and on exact standards as prescribed for the organization. All of this would be autonomously managed. This results in better compliance enforcement across data streams in the business.

• Effortless Integration

In addition to uncovering deep insights from digitized texts, IDP solutions also help enterprises make autonomous decisions on moving the data to other business systems. This allows organizations to build an integrated experience for digitized data. It accelerates results and ROI thereby proving to be a major source of efficient operations for any business.

• Improved Customer Experience

In industries like banking or insurance, IDP can ensure fast, accurate, and reliable processing of documented data. This will result in processes like customer onboarding becoming a simple and fast ecosystem for customers. This improvement in customer experience will reflect positively on the overall goodwill of the business.

Intelligent Document Processing solutions hold the key to unlock the true value of enterprise data often stored away in computer folders. What businesses need is the right tool that can be configured and made compatible with standards followed in their operational ecosystem. This is where products like Docxtractor can be a major asset. Get in touch with us to explore how Docxtractor can help automate and simplify your digital data management processes.