Businesses waste significant time and money in manual document processes. A 2023 Adobe Acrobat survey found that 48% of respondents struggle to find documents quickly and efficiently, and more than one in 10 employees spend more than four hours weekly searching for files online. If these manual processes are paper-based, the inefficiencies just get worse.
Modern organizations need automation to process documents and ingest content faster and smarter, which is where intelligent document processing (IDP) comes in. IDP allows businesses to extract, enter, and store data automatically from documents with little to none human touchpoints. It’s an essential tool for any organization aiming to grow in today’s digital age. Read on to learn why.
What Is Intelligent Document Processing?
Microsoft defines IDP as “a workflow automation technology that scans, reads, extracts, categorizes, and organizes meaningful information into accessible formats from large streams of data.” IDP is a technology solution that processes an array of documents — including PDFs, spreadsheets, and paper — to extract information without human involvement.
IDP uses several technologies to process content:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR): OCR is a necessary evil to convert the black-on-white text in images into machine-readable text to enable automated extraction.
- AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms: AI and ML are used throughout IDP for automating the extraction of data from structured and unstructured documents.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP software interprets the content and assigns an “intent” to the content based on human language characteristics.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA automates the manual and repetitive steps users perform daily.
How Does IDP Work?
There are a number of steps involved in IDP.
- Document capture: In the first step, IDP captures and categorizes documents by importing paper and digital content.
- Data extraction: Once documents are classified, IDP extracts the needed data and uses AI and ML to identify relevant information based on format, keywords, and regions.
- Data processing: IDP routes data to certain places relevant to its content. For example, invoices go to payment processing.
Compared to manual document processing, IDP improves both the speed and accuracy of data ingestion. When suppliers need to be paid, for instance, human workers need to process their invoices individually by hand to keep those transactions moving in manual document environments. With IDP, invoices are automatically ushered through certain steps — the software extracting the invoice data and entering it with little-to-no human touch. This automated data entry eliminates time and creates a visible transaction more quickly than a manual process does.
Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing
There are dozens of reasons why businesses are onboarding IDP. Here are the ones that have the greatest impact:
Increased Efficiency
With humans out of the equation for many repetitive data entry and document processing tasks, you speed up all those workflows. Your employees are able to work on strategic tasks — making both document processing and higher-value work more efficient.
Improved Accuracy
Leveraging IDP enables you to avoid error-prone human touch points throughout your data extraction and ingestion processes. You see greater accuracy throughout your workflows using automation.
Cost Savings
Automation cuts costs in terms of time and labor. When software is in charge of data entry, your employees devote their hours to work like decision-making and strategy, and you save money paying people to do repetitive tasks. You also cut the costs associated with backtracking on work to fix human errors.
Scalability
The more documents your business needs to process, the more people you need to process them if you’re not using automated solutions like IDP. IDP allows you to take in more documents and data without adding headcount.
Enhanced Compliance
By dramatically reducing the risk for human error in any workflow requiring document processing, you necessarily ensure compliance. IDP also helps you manage compliance tasks more easily with document trails.
Better Decision-Making
With your documents processed quickly and accurately, you benefit from having real-time data and better visibility to make smarter decisions about business moves.
Why TotalAgility for IDP?
The solution of choice for businesses looking to leverage IDP is Tungsten Automation TotalAgility®. TotalAgility is a platform for automating content-intensive workflows that combines low-code process and case design with intelligent document processing. It blends generative AI, document processing, machine learning, and process orchestration to support IDP.
TotalAgility offers cognitive document capture capabilities to extract and classify information from data-heavy documents. By applying cognitive capture and AI to unstructured data, TotalAgility enables organizations to speed up workflows, gain more insight from data, and eliminate time-intensive data entry. It is the combination of the previous generation of document capture and data extraction but with a modern case management and process orchestration engine now enhanced by generative and document AI.
TotalAgility also integrates seamlessly into your existing business systems and applications using a range of pre-built connectors, web services, and synthetic API methods. You can get started with TotalAgility quickly with little-to-no business disruption as it weaves into your technology stack.
A sign of a true innovator is the ability to implement solutions that used to take weeks but now take days. AI is not just for the end users. TotalAgility includes an AI CoPilot that allows technical staff and business analysts to create 85% of a solution in minutes in what used to take days or weeks. While the ability to refine these solutions is still in the software, the CoPilot and “Quick” tools get a solution much farther much quicker — hence the “agile” in TotalAgility.
Start Your IDP Journey with All Star
All Star has years of expertise helping organizations take advantage of automation to see greater efficiency and profitability. IDP has the power to transform your productivity, and we’re here to support your business in its efforts to embrace this advanced solution. Get in touch with an IDP expert at All Star today to learn more.
