How to gain a competitive edge by processing documents intelligently?

Finding a way to efficiently and accurately extract data from documents can be crucial in gaining a competitive advantage over your competitors.

Why? Because for decades, data processing tasks have been done primarily by humans. Take invoice processing, for example.

The process of manually reading the invoice, extracting data, entering data, and verifying data, is time-consuming and repetitive.

The problem with this approach is that it is expensive, slow, and no longer scalable for modern businesses. Not to mention that errors within these tasks can become extremely costly for your business.

Therefore, businesses need to ensure that their document processing operation is efficient, fast, reliable, and scalable.

This blog will discuss how businesses can eliminate manual document processing and gain a competitive advantage with Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).

What is document processing?

Document processing, in essence, is a procedure of capturing and converting data from paper or digital documents into structured data. The structured data can then be passed on to a business system such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

For many businesses, data that they receive comes in an unstructured format, such as scanned documents or image files. This data cannot yet be used for business purposes.

These documents are sent by email and downloaded by the receiving party. The receiving party then manually extracts the data and enters the data into an ERP system.

One of the major challenges of manual document processing is the completion time. The more time it takes to be completed, the more costs it will incur for a company and the longer customers need to wait.

Therefore, businesses have started adopting a solution to automate document processing.

What is Intelligent Document Processing?

Intelligent Document Processing is a software solution that automates data capturing, classification, extraction, and entry.

It uses various technologies, which include Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), computer vision, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Computer vision is central in understanding the structure of a document, whereas OCR is used to capture and extract data from it. NLP is used to understand and identify the text that needs to be extracted.

While OCR can already improve document processing significantly with the ability to convert images to text, IDP takes a step further. It uses AI and Machine Learning to automate document extraction while increasing accuracy and quality. In addition to that, they enable an IDP solution to become smarter with the increase in document coverage.

Simply, IDP helps to eliminate the need to process documents manually. Let’s dive into the key advantages of implementing an IDP solution.

The key advantages of IDP

With eliminating manual data capture, extraction, and data entry come multiple advantages that businesses can capitalize on. These advantages include:

• Scalability
• Reduced costs
• Faster turnaround time

Scalability

Can you imagine how much it would cost your company to increase the number of data entry clerks as your document volume increases? It is also important to note that more hours mean more risks for data entry mistakes.

It is safe to say that manual document processing is simply not scalable.

With an IDP solution, your organization can scale up or down based on your growth and demands without sacrificing efficiency or increasing operational costs.

With a tireless and efficient solution like IDP, you can take on larger document volumes and forget annoying bottlenecks.

Reduced costs

Finding ways to increase the bottom line seems to be a solution for many companies to sustain in competitive markets. So how does IDP fit in?

The answer is simple; Intelligent Document Processing helps businesses reduce operational costs. As IDP can eliminate manual tasks, it would reduce labor costs significantly.

Let’s make a simple calculation. Assume that you pay €20 per hour for a data clerk to process documents (one every 10 minutes). Each document that your organization receives would cost you €3,33. If you increase the document number to 100,000, it would cost your organization €333,333.

An IDP solution can process 10,000 documents per hour. Let’s assume that such a solution costs €10,000 based on 100,000 credits (volume). The cost per document would then be €0,10, a massive cost reduction of 3,300%.

The higher the document volume, the cheaper the IDP solution gets.

Faster turnaround time

The longer the turnaround time, the more expensive it is for organizations. Often, customer delays can negatively impact customer trust, satisfaction, and retention levels.

Speeding up document processing and improving the turnaround time is another major advantage of an IDP solution.

Again, let’s assume that a data entry clerk is able to process documents with the speed of 1 per 10 minutes. An IDP software can do the same but within a few seconds.

Let’s assume that an IDP solution completes the data extraction and entry process within 60 seconds at the slowest. That is already ten times faster than a human.

The fast document processing speed is enabled through the deep learning capabilities of an IDP solution. It simply recognizes the document type, patterns, and data points.

IDP has the same capabilities as human brains, without getting tired or having high error rates.

Scale your document processing fast and efficiently with automation

Now it is time to reconsider how you are managing data extraction and entry across your business operations. Start removing frustrations and inefficiencies in the back office with an Intelligent Document Processing solution.

By reshaping your document processing with IDP, you are able to scale, reduce costs, and speed up turnaround time. Don’t sleep on a solution that can bring you a competitive advantage over your competitors. Start automating your document processing today!