5 Core Benefits of Intelligent Document Processing for Your Business  

Paperwork is an inevitable part of the job that most businesses have to deal with.

If your company has a high turnover of physical documentation, you’ve certainly run into a few problems, namely:

• An employee misplacing sensitive files.
• Paperwork processing taking up too much time that employees have to put on hold critical operational duties.
• A high error rate that sees certain tasks getting redone or, if the mistakes go unnoticed, results in serious financial repercussions.

In most cases, a workaround would be to implement OCR software to automate document processing. While it may have made things a little easier, conventional OCR software has its limitations. It has limited document versatility, produces a significant amount of dirty data, and isn’t as reliable as you might have hoped. But by integrating artificial intelligence into your OCR software, you can unleash some capabilities that you didn’t know existed before.

AI-powered OCR engines are the solution to a data management system that is fast, accurate, secure, easily searchable, and low maintenance. 

Below, we’ll discuss 5 Intelligent Document Processing benefits as a result of using AI-powered OCR technology.

1. Faster Data Entry

Paperwork processing is a huge part of the repetitive tasks in your office.

It gets especially worse if you solely rely on manual data entry tactics, without any OCR technology in place to lend a helping hand.

Manual filing systems have far-reaching consequences than meet the human eye. We’ll consider the case of your office salesperson as an example.

The average salesperson loses 16 hours a month to manually updating CRM systems, according to a RingLead study. What’s more, it’s likely that he or she neglects 60% of sales updates due to their tedious nature.

AI-driven OCR technology can automate data entry and improve employee productivity.

Your sales team can reap the benefit of intelligent document processing, in terms of quick and easy data entry by using modern AI-driven OCR software.

Aquaforest estimates that you can process a single page of a document in a second using AI-fueled OCR technology. Each member of the sales team will hence be able to process about 60 pages of paper in one minute.

Sales personnel can therefore complete the paperwork after a day out in the field in the blink of an eye.

As a result, they’ll be more motivated to get the task done, and you’ll achieve a better completion rate of sale updates.

With time spent on data entry reducing, your sales personnel can focus more on their primary objectives.

2. Low Coding Requirements

As a business, you may already have traditional OCRs to process your paperwork. However, contemporary OCR technologies are controlled by fixed templates and rules, geared toward extracting specific data that you need for your business. Consequently, when you need to change what data you want to be captured, or some little detail, that means changing templates and rules.

In other words, the traditional OCR will need to be reprogrammed afresh for changing data needs.

Reprogramming OCR software means you may need a professional, maybe even a department, on your payroll to continually cater for its maintenance.

Alternatively, you’ll have to outsource the task each time you need to change your business’ data capture requirements. Either way, you’re looking at an expanded budget to cater to these traditional OCR challenges.

AI-powered OCR software is the solution for businesses with changing data needs.

Machine learning OCR technology is becoming an effective solution to deal with the problem of data capture constrictions. As opposed to traditional OCR that works within a limitation of pre-programmed extracts, modern OCR software has important adaptive capabilities.

They collect a knowledge pool that contains historical data, which in turn informs future algorithm decisions.

So as your data needs evolve, so too does the underlying algorithm, courtesy of machine learning. This enables the OCR tool to learn from statistical data of usage, and automatically conform to new functionalities.

Consequently, no need for expert programming know-how or outsourcing.

Google is already reaping many intelligent document processing benefits with its Cloud Vision project which combines the best of OCR and AI technologies.

3. More Document Versatility

Traditional OCRs and their rigid programming scope also lead to it being able to process only certain types of documents, as per initial algorithms. Primitive OCR software is shackled by preset document formats.

For example, an accounts payable OCR excels at reading printed documents but may have lower success rates with handwritten documentation.

Consequently, if you only had basic OCR software customized toward that specific input material, it can’t effectively read any other type of document. But now your business needs have grown, and there are JPGs, PDFs, and more in the mix. You need these to go through the same data automation process, to make work easier for your data entry clerks.

That means you may need new software with an automated data extraction process that also supports a wider format template. You wouldn’t have this problem with an AI-based OCR tool.

Modern AI-driven OCR software comes with a huge document format diversity and can learn on the job.

This diversity stems from a combination of comprehensive image processing, natural language, and machine learning capabilities.

Through Natural Language Processing, OCR software can decipher hand-written documents much better.

Machine learning meanwhile enables the OCR software to process a large variety of files without template restrictions. The technology gets better at capturing data with every new task or document type.

In no time, an AI-powered OCR technology can learn document formats foreign to it, thereby unlocking the full range of intelligent document processing benefits.

4. Reduced Dirty Data

Manual data entry is among the leading causes of dirty data.

Human workers make a lot of mistakes during the data entry process, including typos, mismatched entries, incomplete information, and more. And that comes at a great cost to your business.

An Experian study found out that duplicate, incomplete and inaccurate data costs businesses up to 25% of their revenue.

Furthermore, the report reveals that 88% of companies have implemented some sort of data quality strategy. Nonetheless, about 34% of those who have still think that a great deal of their data is off the mark.

Conventional OCR tools also take a share of the blame as well.

Many of the traditional platforms have issues with combining data in different fonts and formats, leading to some of the information not getting read.

With modern OCR software, the probability of dark data is much lower.

Modern AI-based OCR technologies have an accuracy of 98 to 100%. They can perfectly recognize text within images bearing jumbled-up format styles and fonts.

A traditional OCR software typically analyzes the first initial in a document, and this forms the basis of character identification in the rest of the document.

However, a modern OCR tool reads and processes several characters for a wider depth of transformation. Over time and through deep learning, it gets better at recognizing data through historically guided algorithms which consistently reduce the risk of dark and dirty data.

Modern OCR software has improved noise removal too. It learns to continually remove garbage values or blank spaces that might compromise the desired output.

5. Better Data Security

If your business relies on manual file extraction techniques, you probably have a large space set aside for storing, sorting, and referencing these documents.

This physical availability of data costs you money because your storage needs get bigger as your company grows.

But more crucially, manual data entry leads to an increased risk of data breaches and loss.

With so much paperwork in one place, some documents containing sensitive information will inevitably get lost. And there’s no telling where valuable customer PII may wind up, at a time when cybercrime is higher than ever.

What’s more, if you solely rely on this manual data entry system, there’s the risk of losing all your important information in case of a fire or an act of God.

An AI-powered OCR tool reduces the volume of paperwork in your company.

When paired with a cloud storage system, workers can manage data entry more securely. There’ll be no more need to store physical paperwork for future reference. You can destroy or shed physical files as soon as you complete digitizing them.

But that’s not the only benefit of intelligent document processing that you get with an AI-driven OCR and cloud storage pairing.

AI-based OCR software eases data availability as well because you can digitally index data into categories and subcategories, then find what you need, when you need it, without any delay.

This searchability further facilities encryption and confidentiality strategies, which will help your business comply with PII data policies as well.

Conclusion

Poor document processing can single-handedly bring any business down or have them limp their way to staying afloat.

Countless productive hours and resources are lost to this plague every day, but there’s something you can do about it.

AI-powered document management software like Adlib is making a difference for many businesses with large paperwork processing needs. If that describes you, then perhaps it can do the same for yours.

Improved searchability, enhanced security, and better accuracy are some of the benefits of intelligent document processing over manual tactics and traditional OCR. An AI-driven intelligent document processing platform is a superior data handling solution to any of its previous alternatives.

I hope this article opened your eyes to some of the core benefits of intelligent document processing and that you are now ready to give it a try for your business.