Intelligent Document Processing: From Paper To Digital.

Across industries, organizations have ambitious visions of how digitalization will transform their core business and operations. This vision typically includes new and redefined customer journeys enabled by self-service capabilities and complete utilization of available data. However, even highly digitalized enterprises still rely on paper-based documents, despite the challenges that manual document processing entails – reduced job satisfaction, operational inefficiencies, and disparities between teams. This is mainly due to the complexity of integrating new IT solutions onto existing infrastructure, especially with solutions like intelligent document processing (IDP), which requires a significant change in organizational behavior, processes, and investment.

While keeping data at the core of decision-making, a multi-engine, multi-pass approach has each engine playing to its strengths in capturing data.

Status quo of today’s data capturing and extraction

An organization’s information comprising structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents resides across various locations and comes in different velocities. In order to capture or extract the requisite data of value from these documents, digital tools such as ICR, OMR, and OCR come in handy based on whether they are handwritten, machine-printed, or pre-defined type forms. That said, enterprises still face challenges in fully materializing paperless processes:

A multitude of data formats and sources can lead to transcribing errors or suboptimal scanning of documents. If not dealt with using an automated and scalable IDP solution, converting paper documents into digital versions based on each format or source can become cumbersome.

General organizational rigidity, risk-averse decision-making, and employees’ fear of job loss have caused many businesses to avoid digitally optimizing the way in which documents are processed. This lack of access to data in digital form also hinders the implementation of analytics and the discovery of operational insights.

Getting stakeholder agreement between partners, vendors, government agencies, etc., for adopting digital communications necessitates a comprehensive transformation. This entails significant switching costs, which automatically deters the stakeholders.

Clearly, there is a need for an IDP solution that extends beyond just technology capabilities, accelerates tangible outcomes by resolving persistent problems, redefines document intake processes, eliminates inefficiencies, and delivers business value from any part of the world.