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Why intelligent document processing matters for transforming enterprises digitally?

 

Digital transformation is becoming increasingly necessary as firms expand. The use of technology may aid businesses in maintaining their competitiveness, which is something they are constantly searching for. Companies must have a plan to manage and maintain their data if they want to remain competitive. Firms have a lot of documents to process and ensuring that the documents are processed correctly to meet their needs is not an easy task. Thus, maintaining the paperwork as per the current regulations is a tough task. This is where the role of an effective Intelligent Document Processing Solutions comes into play.

Intelligent Document Processing

These days a lot of businesses are using Intelligent Document Processing to automate their document management procedures. For your business to run smoothly, it is important to have a reliable document management system. The advantages of intelligent document processing will be lost if you don't have a suitable system in place.


What is intelligent document processing?

The term Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), sometimes known as "intelligent capture," refers to a group of technologies that may be used to comprehend and convert unstructured and semi-structured material into a structured format.

It involves the use of software tools that can extract relevant data from documents such as emails, text messages, PDFs, and scanned documents and classify it for further processing using AI technologies like computer vision, optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), and machine/deep learning.

Intelligent Document Processing Solutions: How to Start

Determine the kinds of documents you need to manage before searching for a document processing solution. Additionally, you should choose how much processing is required. Hence, to transform the unstructured data into actionable ones, the companies need to implement efficient IDP solutions, either in-house or from different solution providers.

Here are some of the solutions for intelligent document processing available in the market.


Main types of suppliers of IDP solutions


1. Free online or offline tools

One may quickly find a vast number of prospective options for OCR or pdf conversion by searching the Internet for online programs that can transform pictures or pdf files ("actual" or image-based") into something more usable. They have a highly uneven quality and won't work in many situations. In general, there is a success rate for conversion of plain text using common typefaces on a white backdrop (for example for onward translation into another language – sufficient at best to achieve the real sense of the meaning).

It can be noted that the most recent versions of Microsoft Word/Excel and LibreOffice Writer and Calc may convert searchable PDF documents (spreadsheets or text, respectively) quite well if the documents were originally prepared by applications from the same office suite.

However, in general, the cliché "you get what you pay for" still holds, and the free tools are outperformed by most commercial software or customized open-source programmed innovations if one needs more precision, greater flexibility, or forward data integration.


2. Open-Source tools

Since these tools are free and provide a level playing field for study and experimentation, they are the focus of the majority of papers in the field of computer science. Other tools exist for extracting text from searchable PDFs, for Natural Language Processing, or ontological analysis. Tesseract, the most well-known OCR tool, is one of them (there are other alternatives). Tesseract can be combined with OpenCV (for computer vision and Pattern Recognition), Tensor Flow/Keras, or PyTorch in machine-learning developments or research projects.


3. Stand-alone moderately-priced packages aimed at end-users

If one requires rapid, high-quality tangible results from OCR or PDF extraction, using specialized commercial software may be helpful.

This can apply to:

  • a private individual or a small company for a specific limited use case;
  • a research institution that wants to investigate subsequent steps in the workflow without waiting for the output from a longer-term research project.

Some software packages that have been tested (in trial or payable versions):

  • Able2Extract
  • Wondershare PDFElements
  • ABBYY Finereader
  • Kofax Omnipage
  • Adobe Acrobat Professional

4. Higher-end packages with SDK capabilities

An Application Protocol Interface (API), which can be enabled and customized using a Software Development Kit, will be needed if data extraction from a document has to be integrated into a workflow. These are provided by both the manufacturers of standalone products and other companies that concentrate on the entire document workflow.

Some of the solutions:

  • (Kofax) Omnipage Capture SDK
  • ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK
  • Docparser
  • Bytescout SDK

5. SaaS with or without APIs

Some players only provide SaaS (software as a service), where you pay for what you use and volume-based charges are degressive. This strategy applies to standalone documents and APIs.

The GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) and the Adobe PDF Extract API both use this as their primary business model.


6. ERP suppliers

To avoid losing this market entirely to competing products, several firms in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) integrated business solutions industry have begun to provide solutions for document extraction. Although it appears that SAP and Microsoft are engaged in this market, a firm would need to already be a client of these vendors to have a better understanding of their capabilities.


7. Core technologies

The GAFAM firms, or more precisely Google/Amazon/Microsoft, have now acquired much of the underlying technology and cutting-edge scientific research.

  • Google Cloud Vision
  • Amazon Rekognition or AWS
  • Microsoft Azure

8. Niche players

Numerous smaller businesses, start-ups, or niche players may be found in the large supplier environment.

  • Docsumo
  • Filestack
  • Nanonets
  • Parashift
  • Rossum

Conclusion

Businesses may believe that all they need to scan and transfer documents electronically is a scanner and a driver. However, if you are utilizing a document management system with intelligent document processing functions, this is not the case. The papers will be received and handled appropriately thanks to Intelligent Document Processing. With better document management, the business can operate more effectively, avoid mistakes, and maintain compliance. Hence, it is advisable for the companies to adapt to IDP solutions as soon as possible so that the businesses can flow seamlessly without hiccups.