As experience- and indeed, life- continues to show us, the mere fact that a method was adopted first does not necessarily mean that it is the best approach to doing things. This phenomenon rings true when we consider just how efficient Intelligent Document Processing has been since its recent development as a tool for understanding all forms of document whether they are unstructured, structured, or semi-structured. But what is Intelligent Document Processing and what are its benefits? This article will demonstrate the benefits associated with IDP to bring Digital Transformation in Industries using AI-driven content intelligence.
What is Intelligent Document Processing?
Intelligent Document Processing is a group of enterprise solutions that use advanced learning tools in the automation of document processing. Intelligent Document Processing is seen as the “next big thing” after all the strides in the right directions made with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the past few years. This tool of Digital transformation is much better than RPA or Optical Character Recognition (OCR) because unlike the aforementioned, it can work with unstructured documents such as Portable Document Formats (PDFs), Word documents, emails, images and so much more. This ability to automate data extraction and work with unstructured documents makes it a good fit for most organizations as a recent study revealed that the bulk of the content of most organizations is unstructured.
Intelligent Document Processing: The winners
There are a lot of organizations that stand to benefit from Intelligent Document Processing. The list consists of almost all organizations that utilize documents, and they include the mortgage sector, oil and gas, law firms, and even medical establishments. We will now consider these spheres that are set to benefit from adopting Intelligent Document processing.
- Banking and Financial Services
The banking and financial sectors are primed to benefit from the development of Intelligent Document Processing as it can be used to carry out a varied number of tasks. The examples of these include:
- Mortgage underwriting:
While the process of mortgage underwriting usually involves human employees with the duty of studying a bunch of paperwork in other to ascertain whether or not the applicant is creditworthy, Intelligent Document processing automates this “studying” process by extracting the relevant information along specific parameters to adjudge creditworthiness.
- Customer Processing:
Intelligent Document Processing ensures that less time is utilized in sourcing the relevant information of customers in a manner that enables swift verification and classifications. Besides saving time, Intelligent Document Processing guarantees more accuracy when compared to a human task force.
- Effective Compliance with Anti-money Laundering (AML) provisions:
With Commercial banks having to comply with AML regulations such as the Bank Secrecy Act, Intelligent Document Processing seems primed as the perfect tool to rescue them from hours of toil.
- Insurance
The power of intelligent data helps in automation to bring digital transformation in Insurance industries. Intelligent Document Processing can be utilized by the Insurance sector in the following ways:
- To Underwrite Life Assurance:
Intelligent Document Processing enables companies in the Insurance industry to make models that can help classify and source information from documents in a swift fashion. Its utilization in underwriting life insurance will no doubt ensure efficiency and eliminate human errors.
- Ensure fastidious claim processing:
There is no gainsaying that processing insurance claims are a tedious venture both for the claimant and for the insurance company. Intelligent Document Processing eliminates all the toil of claims processing due to its ability to source and work on unstructured data such as images that make up the bulk of the content of claims processing documents.
- Investment management
Intelligent Document Processing can be utilized in the Investment Management sector in the following ways:
- In the automation of Trade Processing:
In this Jet-age, not many Investment firms use hardcopies in their businesses because most of them transact businesses via emails and Portable Document Formats (PDFs) – mediums from which Intelligent Document Processing is versed at relevant extracting data.
- Analyzing Financial Documents:
Intelligent Document Processing can be utilized for financial documents and analysis. It dispenses with the orthodox method of analyzing financial documents- a method wherein a human would toil for endless hours studying financial documents in a bid to extract relevant information. This orthodox method is not only time-consuming, inefficient, and error-prone but has now been rendered obsolete with the emergence of Intelligent Document Processing that does it better and cumulatively for less.
Besides the aforementioned, Intelligent Document Processing can be used to carry out the following activities:
- Archiving Digital Document
- Processing Invoices
- Processing Insurance Claims
- Detecting Fraud
- Reviewing Cases
- Administering Contracts
- Processing applications for mortgage loans
- Onboarding customers
Stages and Components of Intelligent Document Processing
There are at least 5 stages and components of Intelligent Document Processing, namely:
- Pre-processing
- Image processing
- Classification and data extraction
- Data validation
- Integration
Make no bones about it, with Intelligent Document Processing there are no losers. Enterprises that invest in and adopt Intelligent Document Processing will always have a reason to recommend their choice to others (of course, not to direct competitors). To assuage any fragment of doubt in your mind as to just how cost-effective and efficient this tool of digital transformation – Intelligent Document Processing- is, let’s consider a scenario:
Let’s say that 2 companies have the same amount of tasks to do: Company A has refused to utilize Intelligent Document Processing and Company B has adopted Intelligent Document Processing. Now, let’s assume that company A has 5 employees who cumulatively earn $1 million yearly and they perform 500,000 tasks each year for a given process, each task will cost $2. Company B on the other hand decides to automate 75% of its task- a decision that would cost it 50 cents for each task- it would have saved itself $750,000 each year.
Conclusion:
Additionally, besides the money saved which could be channeled to other critical areas, Intelligent Document Processing also ensures that human resource is deployed to key areas where their humanity or and its sensitivity can be best utilized. It frees up the workforce from the brain-draining, tedious and repetitive work of data processing that is best handled by computers that are more consistent and accurate.