Document processing has always been a major part of business. In the past, processing important data required hours of manual data entry—forcing team members to dedicate significant portions of their work week to copying down information instead of focusing on higher level tasks.
As technology has progressed, many aspects of processing documents have become automated. And thanks to a dedication to innovation, there is now ABBYY Vantage. Vantage takes automation in document processing and brings it into the realm of intelligence.
Intelligent document processing leverages the combined power of artificial intelligence, machine learning, optical character recognition, natural language processing, and more to streamline processing workflows for any kind of document—including hand-written information.
By looking at what document processing is and has been, we can contextualize the advancements ABBYY put together to create Vantage and paint a picture of what the future of document processing looks like.
Before we get into things like AI in document management, we need to understand the basic underpinnings of processing documents. As documents come in, the relevant information from each one needs to be identified and utilized correctly.
For documents that are relevant to multiple departments, that can get complex when running things manually. It may entail creating macros for spreadsheets to help each department shift data to have faster access to their key data fields or even multiple teams processing data from copies of the same documents.
However your organization processes documents, relying on manual processes opens you up to errors. Data may get entered in the wrong field, information may be skipped, whole documents could be lost or wind up in a spam folder—there are so many ways a mistake can occur.
And the longer that mistake goes unrecognized, the worse off you are. A mistake processing payroll can mean huge swathes of your team getting paid incorrect amounts. A mistake in your logistics documentation can lead to important products sitting in a warehouse when they need to be in your customers’ hands.
Also, your business insights rely on having access to accurate, up-to-date information. Errors in document processing can lead to executives making imprudent decisions based on faulty data. ABBYY Vantage was created to massively mitigate the risks that come with poorly or non-automated document processing.
Many ABBYY Vantage features were developed and implemented as solutions to opportunities for improvements that were discovered while process mining. That’s not true of every feature, but even the tools that were a part of past ABBYY products were able to be combined with new tools to create new solutions.
At the core of intelligent document processing is optical character recognition, or OCR. OCR programs are able to translate the information in a document into recognizable objects that can then be plugged into appropriate processes.
In Vantage, OCR provides the backbone for cognitive capture functionality. This combines OCR tech with classification and document recognition skills to allow your software to take in a document, classify its type, and sort its data into the processes that its document type relates to.
A major component of cognitively capturing information is the ability to differentiate between important data and extraneous fluff. This is how natural language processing in document management enters the picture.
NLP allows a machine to interpret the information coming in from the OCR. It allows a program to understand the context of the information in a given document. This is how ABBYY Vantage is able to pull accurate data from any type of document—be it structured, semi-structured, unstructured, or even handwritten.
Taking the information gathering tools discussed above, Vantage employs features such as machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) to actually carry out the document processing tasks the software was designed to address.
RPA takes information from specific fields and distributes it into relevant workflows based on established rules that have been programmed into the tech. The machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) features in ABBYY Vantage help recognize further opportunities for automation and to find more efficient pathways to put your data through while processing a document.
With the strength of machine learning in document processing—along with AI—your Vantage software is able to constantly improve without your team needing to plug in new directions all the time.
ABBYY Vantage has a no-code/low-code development feature that allows you to create cognitive skills to address your unique document management needs. These skills serve a number of purposes.
This is where having AI in document management is a huge benefit. In conjunction with the OCR and NLP features, Vantage can apply the correct skills to each document, sending all relevant information along all relevant workflow pipelines.
It should be noted that Vantage comes with many pre-programmed cognitive skills, but has been created with the user in mind—the no-code/low-code approach allows even relatively inexperienced team members to create tools that will help improve your document processing.
Read More: ABBYY Vantage Core Capabilities
With all the features available, what are some use cases that Vantage can be leveraged against to improve your document processing? Here are just a few common industries and processes that ABBYY Vantage can help you out with.
Finance is an area where accurate document processing can be the difference between riches and ruin. Document workflow automation helps speed documents through your processes without sacrificing efficiency.
Whether you need to classify loan applications, defend the validity of a transaction, or accelerate and smooth out client onboarding, Vantage can give you the functionality you require.
ABBYY Vantage can help streamline your product shipping and receiving needs by digitizing and processing the paperwork that can wind up slowing down the whole delivery mechanism. From bills of lading to expediting orders, intelligent document processing can make logistics run much more smoothly.
Additionally, you can ensure that your processes do not get thrown off by the differently formatted documents used by different parcel services and their air freight partners. By training your Vantage software in skills related to recognizing and categorizing the information coming in, you keep your shipping processes running smoothly, no matter who is moving your materials.
Sifting through claims applications can be extremely challenging and time consuming, resulting in a lot of dedicated time from your team and potentially overlong delays for your client. Vantage takes out the human error that can throw off your processes and augment the work your human team is doing.
Digital document workflows allow you to track information every step of the way through your workflows. That means that if you need to perform an internal audit or need to comply with external regulatory institutions, you can easily show everything you have done with every piece of data relevant to the situation.
The primary benefits of intelligent document processing come in the form of speed and accuracy. Because Vantage can recognize, categorize, and distribute data to the proper workflow pipelines faster and more accurately than any human ever could, it can improve your business operations exponentially.
Vantage is an invaluable tool for your enterprise document processing system because it can take any kind of document and digitize the information for a seamless trip through your processes.
Look at it this way: with ABBYY Vantage, you don’t need different processes in place to track and process documents that come in via email or regular mail because Vantage allows you to automate processes for digital and physical documents with similar, extremely low error rates.
ABBYY has a long history of collaboration and integration with all the leading enterprise content management platforms—including Oracle, Microsoft, and M-Files among others. So ABBYY Vantage integration is not a difficult task for someone who knows how these platforms work.
The cognitive skills that are such a key feature of ABBYY Vantage allow it to connect seamlessly to the programs and applications that drive your organization. And even if you have an industry specific program without an existing integration pathway, Vantage is designed to facilitate the training of new skills to make that integration work.
TEAM IM has cultivated gold level partnerships with multiple content management software providers and has a team of experts with collective decades of experience helping our partners improve their document management processes.
Whether you are seeking to add intelligent document processing to your technology stack alongside a cloud migration or as part of a switch to a different software platform or as a standalone project, TEAM can help make your transition painless with minimal interruption of day-to-day operations.
The application of ABBYY Vantage to your document processing workflows helps overcome the challenges presented by manual document management, but also helps to address common pitfalls that some people still associate with intelligent document processing.
Some common challenges that ABBYY Vantage is designed to address are as follows:
When looking toward the future, we can extrapolate out from the developments that led to intelligent document processing tools like ABBYY Vantage to see how the technology will continue to evolve.
Keep in mind that the tools that make up many of the key features of ABBYY Vantage are not new. ABBYY has had OCR in tools like FlexiCapture for years and machine learning technology has been growing for a very long time.
What Vantage does is combine the usage of these existing tools in such a way that your document processing becomes smoother and faster, no matter the kind of document you are working with.
As we look to the future, we can expect automation of document processing to extend even further into workflows and for individual processes to tie together more completely—many experts refer to this as process orchestration because individual processes combine and interact more like an orchestra than as solo musicians.
Because of the way ABBYY Vantage makes use of AI and machine learning, it is already set up for success when it comes to adapting to changing requirements in the future. The software itself is always learning how to better accomplish its tasks and new trained skills can help address changing requirements as they arise.
Intelligent document processing has arrived and is here to stay. It allows your team to focus on innovation and problem solving instead of time consuming data entry tasks while massively improving the efficiency and accuracy of your document processing.
With the help of the experts at TEAM IM, you can integrate ABBYY Vantage into your workflows as seamlessly as possible and begin to reap the benefits faster than you may expect. Reach out to us today to see how soon you can take advantage of the many features of ABBYY Vantage.
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