Intelligent Document Processing: The Key to Enabling a Remote Workforce
As more workers transition to a work from home environment, companies are relying on IDP to maximize document processing speed, agility and transparency
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For better or worse, remote work is here to stay. While most office workers will return to the physical workplace eventually, permanent remote work is expected to double over the next year.
Even for those who don’t go fully remote, some experts estimate that by 2025, roughly 70% of the workforce will work remotely at least five days a month.
In this new distributed work environment, relying on paper-based document management is simply not an option. As tempting as it is to use email to share and manage documents, doing so will only lead to inefficient processes, confusion and frustration as keeping track of emailed documents is incredibly difficult. It’s also one of the least secure methods of document sharing.
This is where intelligent document processing (IDP) comes in. IDP leverages artificial intelligence (AI) enabled tools such as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, deep learning and machine learning (ML) to classify, categorize, and extract relevant information from documents, and validate the extracted data. In other words, it transforms unstructured and semi-structured information pulled from documents such as PDFs, emails and scanned images into usable data. It also enables employees to process and manage documents from any location with a secure internet connection, as well as access relevant document analytics.
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Benefits of IDP include increased visibility (and thereby accountability), reduced compliance-related risk and the enablement of automated workflows. With IDP, users all across the globe can track document heavy processes like invoice processing or contract validation in real-time and are automatically alerted if an issue or bottleneck arises. In fact, TechRepublic predicts that more than a fifth of all companies will invest in IDP over the next year.
As Stephen DeWitt, the Chief Security Officer at Automation Anywhere recently commented in Forbes, “Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), in particular, will emerge as a major tool for businesses to successfully navigate a completely remote workforce. Every organization will need to be able to process structured and unstructured data autonomously to work efficiently. IDP allows bots to process emails, signatures, and PDFs—enabling document-intensive processes such as insurance claims, loan applications, and invoices to be automated.”
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IDP in Action at the CA DMV
For decades the DMV was sort of a mascot for bad customer service. However, by adopting efficiency boosting technologies such as IDP, this is starting to change.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, like so many other organizations, California Department of Motor Vehicles was forced to transition to a work-from-home environment practically overnight with minimal impact to service delivery.
A decade ago this wouldn’t have posed a significant challenge. ABBYY’s Digital Mailroom IDP solution - a set of AI-powered tools that extract data from documents, classify them and then route the document to the correct department. Using IDP as an anchor technology, they were able to build a “virtual field office” capable of delivering the same (if not better) level of service as before.
For more real world examples of how organizations are leverage IDP to enable a distributed workforce as well as accereate operational performance and deliver robust streams of high-quality data for RPA consumption, check out our recent webinar on Building a Data-Centric and Customer-Obsessed Organization with Intelligent Document Process (IDP).
The key for global corporate enterprise is to benefit from the collective intelligence presented by RPA and cognitive technologies along with human workers. Only by having technology combine with human talent can global corporate enterprise achieve scalable intelligent automation. And only with scalable intelligent automation enterprise resiliency be realized. Join that community for lessons learned at SRIA Live.Scalable RPA & Intelligent Automation Live
