How intelligent document processing automates content-intensive processes

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is changing the dynamic of a longstanding enterprise content management problem: dealing with unstructured content. By applying artificial intelligence capabilities, IDP enables companies to automate the processing of virtually any type of content, from paper, emails and PDFs to forms, images, and Word documents.

Gartner estimates unstructured content makes up 80% to 90% of all new data and is growing three times faster than structured data¹. The ability to effectively wrangle all that data can have a profound, positive impact on numerous document-intensive processes across enterprises.

The problem with unstructured content

Until recently unstructured content was largely out of reach of automation because of its nature. It’s relatively easy to automate the processing of structured content such as databases and spreadsheets because you know where the data you want is going to be located and can write programs to find it with reasonable accuracy.

Not so with unstructured content. Whether your business process involves scanned paper documents, PDFs, email, Word documents, or images, relevant information can be located literally anywhere in the document. On top of that, the same information can be expressed in many possible formats, such as PO# vs Purchase Order Number, or even something as simple as date can be represented as Jan. 21, 2024, 01/21/2024, 1/21/24, or even 21/1/24, depending on the document’s region of origin.

Faster and more accurate processing with IDP

IDP systems, which use artificial intelligence technology such as large language models and natural language processing, change the equation. With proper training, IDP systems can “read” documents much like a human does, find relevant data, extract it, and paste it into another system for downstream processing. And IDP is generally much faster and more accurate than data entry clerks who are “seeing and keying” for hours on end.

“Modern IDP platforms take intelligent document capture and processing to a new level,” says Dennis Chepurnov, Product Marketing Manager at Hyland, which makes enterprise content management solutions that include IDP. “With IDP, information onboarding can be automated and significantly accelerated, reducing process bottlenecks and improving the quality of information at the same time.”

Industries and use cases where IDP can apply include:

• Healthcare: Insurance claims processing and medical records management, including digitizing and organizing records
• Financial services: Loan and mortgage processing, including automated extraction and verification of financial documents
• Insurance: Automated policy intake, extracting and verifying data relative to claims and underwriting processing
• Government: Tax return processing and compliance checks as well as public records management, including digitizing and archiving government records for easy retrieval
• Cross-function, back-office capabilities, including contract management, invoice processing, customer and employee onboarding, resume screening, and e-discovery

As with most any new technology, there are plenty of vendors anxious to claim the best IDP solution for your needs. In choosing among them, most organizations will want a flexible solution that is able to handle myriad use cases that different departments across the company may want to address.

Toward that end, organizations should look out for these key features:

• Modular architecture: It’s important to be able to add capabilities to your IDP platform over time. It should also seamlessly augment your workflows and processes and integrate well with other enterprise applications and services.
• Low code: IDP solutions need to be easy enough to use that it doesn’t require data scientists to design applications to fit your specific use cases. Ideally, you want the folks who perform the process to be heavily involved in automating it, including training the IDP AI engines on what to look for.
• Fast and scalable: To gain the full benefit of process automation, the IDP solution needs to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per day and be able to recognize and classify documents in milliseconds.
• Continually learning AI engine: An IDP solution should improve over time by learning from any user corrections and using them to adjust classification and extraction rules on its own.

Document processing is an area where almost any company could benefit from automation. IDP enables you to apply it even to the vast majority of your content that, for too long, was hard to reach: unstructured content.

Learn how Hyland’s enterprise content management solutions can help your business.

_{[1] “Possibilities and limitations, of unstructured data,” Research World, Feb. 20, 2023.}