Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is taking the business world by storm. Growing at an astonishing CAGR of 35.4% between 2020 and 2027, according to a report by Market Research Future, IDP is becoming the go-to solution for every business that wants to boost its bottom line while streamlining its operations.
Businesses had to rely solely on manual data entry to process documents – a tedious and error-prone process that frequently resulted in losing data, culminating in frustration, and wasted time. The development of automated and intelligent document processing has been a game-changer for businesses seeking a faster, more reliable way to handle document processing.
So, what is IDP?
A cognitive software solution that automatically reads, categorizes, and extracts data from documents, slashing processing time and boosting accuracy like never before. Not just that, IDP can also track documents through the organization, ensuring they are appropriately routed and accounted for. The COVID-19 pandemic boosted digital transformation across every industry. As more businesses increasingly adopt digital workflows, IDP becomes an indispensable and essential tool for managing documents.
Leveraging the technologies of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Machine Learning (ML), IDP allows reading, classifying, analyzing, and extracting relevant data and evaluating it with accuracy.
Streamlining workflows
Let’s envision this: Your organization is embarking on a digital transformation journey, and data is the password to success. But here is the catch: over 80% of enterprise databases are encrypted in an unstructured or semi-structured format. Considering business documents, emails, images, or PDFs, a lot of complex data requires smarter processing. This is where IDP comes in. IDP’s ability to process complicated data accurately plays a crucial role in extending the scope of automation to sophisticated processes, enabling enterprises to enhance their operations and approach hyper-automation efficiently.
Before exploring IDP use cases, let us understand the types of documents different businesses use. Though it depends broadly on the kind of business, the most common documents that require processing in most businesses are:
- Forms/applications – on paper or online
- Invoices
- Receipts
- Sales orders
- Insurance claim forms
- Payslips
- Contracts
- ID cards/ scanned ID proof
- Emails
- Pdfs
- Letters
- Lists
- Medical documents
Apart from processing particular documents, the IDP solutions may require extracting specific fields depending on the sort of business, such as financial information or dates or addresses, etc.
Real-world use cases of Intelligent Document Processing
Let me take you through some of the real-world use cases where IDP plays a key role.
Finance and Accounts
Dealing with information that is sensitive and enormous, the finance team manages a firm’s finances, and its payroll – ensuring employees are paid on time, files tax returns, pays invoices and also handles accounts payable. IDP solution can rapidly scan and extract key figures and process them from bank statements, receipts, invoices, contracts, and more. Thus, it frees the employees from the error-prone and strenuous aspect of their work, allowing them to perform more cognitive tasks in their firm.
Banking
Much like the accounting field, banking involves heavy document processing activities that must be secure and accurate. Activities such as KYC verification, personal finance management, paying invoices, applications like overdrafts and credit cards, credit disbursement, maintaining financial records, and more, are a part of banking activities.
In this digital age, where it is not just about not dealing with paper documents and physical meetings, it is also about high-end security, and seamless automation to handle online applications and requests involving financial documents. Customized IDP solutions are necessary to extract, organize and process the documents. Banking professionals also need to recognize scanned documents such as IDs, signatures, bills, and other documents meticulously for authorization. IDP solutions can make this rigorous process simpler, faster and seamless without any compromises.
Insurance
Insurance sector professionals count extensively on data and evidence. Additionally, they also must manage a high number of claims and application forms.
Some of their key duties include:
- Keeping track of claims
- Processing fresh insurance claims
- Scrutinizing potential fraud claims
- Gathering evidence which are in emails and scanned documents
- Administration tasks related to each claim
- Databases and client records update
The insurance process involves extracting and organizing data from forms and submitted documents, for which insurance experts require a quick and effective method to do so. Also, the communication goes back and forth frequently between the insurer and the claimant mainly via email along with important data through digital documents. Hence, IDP is critical to capture input rapidly, pre-fill online forms and convert data to different formats. Automation makes the process seamless, allowing the claims specialist to concentrate on complicated cases.
Healthcare
Healthcare institutions absolutely require precise and fast document processing. As a result, automation and machine learning are extremely crucial in supporting medical practitioners in managing admin tasks such as:
- Medical records digitization
- Maintaining medical records
- Patient registrations
- Doctors’ notes
- Creating prescriptions
Doing the same assists in the standardization of a database and medical practices. Medical professionals can devote their time more into treating, diagnosis and medical support rather than spend time on accessing old records, prescriptions and reports.
The possible use cases of IDP are colossal. With the focus shifting towards IDP across industries such as Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Telecom, Media, Research and academia, Law, etc., to its relevant use cases across the various business functions which are vital in any organisation. The prominent business functions include finance, accounting, sales and marketing, HR, Supply chain, customer service, IT and more. You can read more about the possible use cases for every business in this comprehensive eBook.
Top 8 Benefits of IDP
Integrating IDP in organizations that deal with a good volume of semi/ unstructured data, where OCR or traditional automation cannot efficiently process the documents, benefits them enormously. IDP takes data processing to a whole new level.
- Accelerates data processing time: IDP speeds up the data extraction time by 10 times and cuts down overall processing time by 85%.
- Boosts accuracy and productivity: In comparison with manual data processing, the IDP solution achieves 99.9% accuracy and removes errors. Moreover, speedy processing and lower human intervention result in much-enhanced productivity.
- Saves costs: IDP allows enterprises to save up to 70% of business expenditures that are associated with manual procedures, human resources, and error mitigation in manual document processing.
- Easy usability: IDP solution is simple to use and doesn’t call for complex data science skills or installations.
- Flexibility and scalability: Integrating with an enterprise’s existing platform is easy with IDP solutions. It can also combine with existing automation solutions such as RPA, and pre-trained models and optimize processes further. Scaling up and down as per the requirements is also effortless with IDP.
- Raises employee value: IDP solutions enhance employee value effectively by relieving 80% of employees from error-prone and repetitive document processing and making room for high-value tasks.
- Easy data storage: IDP makes sure the document processing goes paperless which results in easy data storage (digitally), easier access to data, and seamless data sharing between peers. All of this facilitates the digital transformation of an organization.
- Insights from unstructured data: IDP pulls out relevant data from an array of semi- and unstructured data. This provides an organization with valuable insights and intelligence which helps in furthering the business.
How can we help?
Are you looking to transform your organization’s document processing with the help of intelligent automation? You must check out Saxon’s Power Scan. Based on the Power Platform, it is a comprehensive IDP solution that automates, extracts and validates data along with analytics. Furthermore, Power Scan is affordable and easy to use, which is tailored to your business needs. You can get in touch and find out more about it.
