Documents, and especially the data they contain, are the most important asset of any business. Yet organizations continue to struggle with inefficient document management triggered by unstructured data in digital and paper documents. Does your company, too? This has a direct, negative impact on your business success, something you can actually avoid with today’s capabilities. The concept of Automated Document Processing is anything but new. However, advances in recent years have improved the capabilities of solutions to the point where document processing is now fundamentally transformed. The best example of this is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), which allows you to process all your documents automatically and on a single platform.
In this article, we will address the following points:
- What the various challenges of manual document processing are
- What benefits you can secure with automated document processing
- What the core elements of the Parashift Intelligent Document Processing platform are and how it will benefit your organization
- What the future of document processing might look like
The problems with manual document processing
Manual document processing is largely due to fragmented IT systems and unstructured, isolated data. If document processing in your organization is manual, the following are just some of the problems you face:
Slow and inefficient processes: If your employees spend the majority of their work time entering data into systems, manually sorting paper documents, or searching for lost documents, you’ll quickly end up with delays in processing times and lower productivity. Not to mention the demotivating work your skilled teams have to deal with on a daily basis.
High costs: Your resources are limited. You don’t want to waste the high personnel costs on processes that are essential, but at the same time offer you little added value.
Huge security risks: Manual data entry is always vulnerable to typos and human error. Not only does this lead to inaccurate data in your systems and expensive corrections, but it poses other security risks: sensitive information can be lost or fall into the wrong hands. Any non-compliance can quickly become a financial burden (through fines).
Not Scalable: As your business grows, manual document processing becomes an impossibility. At least if you don’t hire additional staff, which obviously has a negative impact on costs.
Customer satisfaction suffers: Manual document processing is incredibly time-consuming, which can lead to processing delays and lower productivity. This can negatively impact customer relationships and possibly damage your company’s reputation.
Let’s look at three examples of industries to further illustrate the impact of manual document processing:
- Inefficient claims processing for insurance companies: Insurance companies primarily rely on document processing to manage insurance claims. This includes paper-based documents such as forms, medical records, and policies. If the processing of these documents is done manually, delays, errors, inefficiencies and longer processing times are the consequence. This in turn results in dissatisfied customers.
- Slow mortgage processing for banks and financial service providers:Mortgage applications involve a significant amount of documents such as salary statements, property plans and pension fund statements. Manual processing of these documents means slow processing and ends in delayed closing dates and frustrated customers.
- Delayed onboarding for HR departments: HR departments rely on efficient document processing to manage employee information such as application forms and CVs. If this is done manually, it leads to misunderstandings, delayed onboarding and low productivity.
So one thing is clear: no matter what industry your company is in, isolated data doesn’t add value. Automating document processing is therefore essential for your business.
The benefits of automated document processing for your business
Basically, automated document processing is nothing more than a system that allows documents to be captured, indexed, stored and accessed, just in an automated manner. But here, too, the solutions on the market naturally differ greatly from each other. The most advanced system is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), because it is a platform that combines several powerful technologies to process even complex documents automatically.
These are some of the fundamental advantages of IDP for your organization:
Cost savings: By automating document processing, you reduce costs many times over. This is reflected not only in the fact that you have to spend less on personnel, but also in document-based processes that run much more smoothly and quickly.
Improved accuracy and increased efficiency: Intelligent Document Processing uses advanced technologies such as machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing to extract data from documents with high accuracy. The high accuracy enables you to improve decision making, which in turn enables more efficient processes.
Minimization of errors and improved compliance: Accurate data capture minimizes errors. Real-time data in workflows enables your organization to identify bottlenecks, monitor performance, and make data-driven decisions. At the same time, automated document processing helps your organization comply with regulatory requirements. This massively reduces the risk from compliance breaches and the associated hefty fines.
Scalability: An automated document processing solution like IDP can be easily scaled. This system can process a large volume of documents without requiring you to dedicate additional resources. As a result, Intelligent Document Processing exceeds the needs of your growing business.
Improved customer satisfaction: With IDP, you free up your teams and instead use them to respond more quickly and accurately to customer inquiries and requests. With improved customer satisfaction, you’ll set your company apart from the competition.
Increased employee satisfaction and improved collaboration: By eliminating much of the manual data entry, you reduce the burden on your employees, resulting in higher employee morale. Furthermore, IDP improves collaboration between teams and departments by providing a central repository for documents and data.
It is possible that you have already integrated an OCR solution for part of your document extraction. However, that doesn’t mean that this system is the best possible one for your requirements. More likely, the capabilities of these solutions are limited, because most:
- are dependent on templates and rules
- unsuitable for document variation and
- therefore highly inflexible.
The core elements of the Parashift Intelligent Document Processing platform and how it can benefit your business
A look at this world map (based on data from analyst Everest Group) shows how rapidly the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) vendor market has evolved from 2019 to 2022. Even though the technologies are fundamentally the same, the various vendors still differ in the approach of their IDP platform. Parashift, for example, uses an innovative approach in that learning models are not associated with specific document types, but instead are divided into extraction entities.
These are a few of the features and capabilities that set the Parashift IDP platform apart from other solutions on the market:
Next generation artificial intelligence: The core concept of the Parashift IDP platform is its proprietary Document Swarm Learning. This technology allows you to automatically classify hundreds of document types and extract document data. The machine learning algorithms that power Document Swarm Learning train on billions of data points and continuously learn – with every document, from every customer, and from every industry. To do this, document types are separated into individual fields, creating a global data network for unprecedented out-of-the-box capabilities. Shared learnings across document types, customers and industries ensure maximum efficiency. This represents a unique feature in the IDP industry. Parashift’s AI-powered platform frees your employees from tedious work, lowers costs, and reduces cycle times.
Seamless integration with your systems: The Parashift platform integrates seamlessly with your existing application landscape. Intelligent Document Processing never acts as a competitor to other solutions, but rather enhances existing business applications, workflows and document management systems. The result: your applications can suddenly work with complex documents and unstructured data much faster and with less effort.
Secure, GDPR compliant cloud SaaS solution: GDPR is central to everything Parashift does. Therefore, the modern cloud infrastructure is fully GDPR compliant. ISO27001 and HIPAA compliant data centers make Parashift a secure IDP provider for your business, no matter what industry or where you are in the world. Through the cloud SaaS solution, you can be guaranteed a global service with the highest level of security and continuous software improvements.
No-Code Platform: In addition to the pre-trained and ready-to-use standard document types that you activate with one click, you can easily create individual document types yourself. And thanks to the no-code approach, completely without the help of experts or developers.
For much more than just invoices: Invoice processing is the most common use case. While the Parashift IDP platform can of course handle any invoices, that’s far from the limit. You can just as easily use it to automatically capture and process contracts, mailroom, vehicle registration documents, transportation orders, credit applications, claims, medical records and many more. Parashift Intelligent Document Processing is designed specifically for constantly varying layouts.
In summary, automated document processing with Parashift’s IDP platform has a tremendous impact on your business success:
- You easily integrate the powerful technology into your software landscapes without having to replace your proven business applications.
- You’ll process hundreds of different document types automatically – with a single solution, through a single platform.
- Extract only the data you need from documents, including line item data.
- Configure individual document types with virtually no effort thanks to the easy-to-use no-code platform – and completely without IT specialists.
- The global data network (Document Swarm Learning) enables continuous learning across all documents and customers. The accuracy of data capture thus improves continuously and in a fully automated way.
The future of document processing
The volume of data will only continue to increase in the future. As a result, every company will continue to face the challenge of having to access and process unstructured data in order to move business processes forward efficiently. Only with an automation solution that is intelligent and advanced can these challenges be met. The future of document processing lies in the continued implementation and adaptation of intelligent and advanced technologies.
