Every industry in the modern world is driven by data. Having the right data in the right place when you need it can be the difference between outmaneuvering your competition and falling behind them. Handling data securely, accurately, and efficiently also improves your relationships with your client base because they can rely on you to demonstrate a customer-first mentality and address their needs.
Automatic document processing (ADP) gives you these capabilities and more. Whether processing invoices, interfacing with your CRM to create a list for your next marketing email, or turning unstructured information into usable data, ADP helps make your data work for you. The benefits of document automation are numerous. They can have a positive effect on nearly every aspect of your organization. From helping your team focus on important tasks to strengthening your relationships with your partners and customers, ADP is one of the most effective tools you can bring to bear for your company.
One thing that can be a little confusing is how many different ways document processing can be automated. ADP is not just one thing. There are a few different tools that can be used for document automation—depending on what kinds of documents you are pulling information from. At the core of ADP is facilitating fast, accurate data extraction. When processing documents, you need to be able to recognize the key data necessary for the process at hand and plug that data into your report, invoice, records, etc.
ADP tools use technology such as optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) to identify relevant data and extract it, categorize it, and apply it in the processes they were designed to automate. When it comes to utilizing data from structured documents like spreadsheets, robot process automation (RPA) is an effective automated document processing tool. RPA utilizes machine learning to recognize data from specific fields to extract and apply.
When you have specifically formatted content to process, RPA is incredible. Even if you need to run a macro on a spreadsheet to ensure that every column and line is named and ordered in a specific way, the time savings from RPA can be immeasurably valuable. But not every piece of necessary data comes in a structured document. Sometimes the information you need comes in the body of an email or as part of a scanned paper invoice or displayed in a jpeg of a table of information. These are some examples of unstructured documents.
But just because a document is unstructured, does not mean there are no ways to incorporate it into your automated document processing. As artificial intelligence tools have improved and developed, intelligent document processing has emerged as a premier ADP technology. Now, this is where things can get a bit confusing, because there are ADP products that operate as a kind of augmented RPA—they are machine learning programs that have some AI tools for expanded functionality. But those are not the same as automated document processing as an umbrella term for document processing software that allows for automation.
Intelligent document processing is a type of automated processing, but is capable of far more complicated tasks than RPA or products marketed as automatic but not intelligent. So in order to clarify that admittedly confusing distinction, let’s look at what IDP does. Similar to RPA, IDP also uses machine learning tied to OCR, but its NLP is trained as a large language model generative AI program, which allows for greater ability to recognize key data values—no matter what format contains that data.
Unlike RPA, intelligent processing software can “look” at a document, even if it is an image, to spot important data points for extraction and categorization. And because the AI has extensive knowledge of how language works, it can use context in blocks of text to recognize the data that less advanced technology would miss.
Both RPA and IDP are forms of automated document processing. Both are valuable tools when used correctly. IDP can do the same things as RPA and has more use cases than RPA, but depending on how you need to automate your processes and your anticipated growth, one may be better for your organization than the other. With the extraction, data classification, and application abilities of ADP, your company stands to benefit greatly.
It would be easy to say that ADP benefits the organizations that utilize it by making data related processes run faster. But that is only where the benefits start.
Again, speed is not the only benefit provided by ADP, but it’s a good place to start. Processing documents manually takes a lot of time and effort from your team. It is repetitive and time consuming—and the longer it takes, the more likely that a mistake or two will be made because of a natural lapse of focus.
Automating those document processing tasks reduces what could take a human hours to less than a minute in most cases. If the processing load is not particularly high, those tasks could only take a matter of seconds. And because computers do not have the physical limitations of a human, you don’t have to worry about fatigue causing errors that have to be identified and rectified. This frees your team to use their minds to address projects that require the kind of human ingenuity that AI just cannot provide.
One of the great things about automating your document processing is that the entire process can be tracked and audited. If you are in an industry that needs to demonstrate that your processes run in compliance with regulatory laws, being able to easily audit any instance of data processing can be incredibly helpful. In fact, because automated document processing operates with machine learning at its core, you can program compliance measures into the automated processes you use the technology to establish.
That means that the processes you’ve automated via RPA or IDP literally cannot operate out of compliance. Sometimes humans can take shortcuts, which can result in required steps being skipped—when those processes are conducted automatically, shortcuts around compliance measures can be eliminated without adding significant time to the processing of any document.
One of the major benefits of IDP specifically, is the AI that drives it can learn and improve the longer it operates on a specific process. This is accomplished through the interaction of your technology and your workforce. As you begin to automate your document processing, you’ll want to have your experienced team checking to make sure that the programs are operating correctly. As your team conducts data verification and feedback is given, your IDP software will learn what to avoid and what to repeat.
As you continue with your automated processes, less and less human oversight will be needed—but that is not all. As more tools are developed and as more innovations are concocted, your team can teach your automated document processing solution increasingly optimal pathways to accomplish its task.
The ability to continually improve makes intelligent document processing and other forms of ADP scalable. As your organization grows, your document processing software can be trained to grow with it. That’s a major benefit for your team. Instead of getting swamped by attempting to manually process an increasingly large quantity of documents in the same amount of time, your automated document processing can handle the increased volume for them.
The choices a business makes must be based on the accurate interpretation and analysis of data. By automating your document processing across the breadth of your organization, you get accurate information as quickly as possible. That means your reports can be compiled faster, trends can be identified sooner, underperforming partnerships can be flagged before they drag down your bottom line too severely, and so on.
Having more information in less time allows your organization to pivot away from ineffective strategies or put more focus on well-performing initiatives as soon as possible—giving you an advantage over competitors who have not embraced automated document processing.
We have looked at some of the biggest benefits that ADP can bring your way, but have not looked at the ways different industries can utilize ADP. Depending on a company’s area of expertise, they have different documents and data points that need to be processed.
So here are a few examples of how different industries can utilize the power of automated document processing:
Essentially, wherever an industry has document management needs that are rules based—meaning that they do not necessarily require interpretation of data, but extraction and categorization for people to utilize after the fact—some form of automated document management can address those needs faster and more accurately than manual processing ever could.
So what kind of automated document processing is right for your organization? And how can you ensure that it will integrate with your technology stack? The best way to answer these questions is to reach out to TEAM IM. At TEAM IM, our experts have decades of collective experience in analyzing workflows, processes, and content management systems to optimize our clients’ technology usage. We will work with you to identify business priorities, automation opportunities, and seamlessly integrate the best solution for you into your systems.
And because of our experience and knowledge, we can upgrade your systems with as little disruption to your business operations as possible. We will also work with you to explore your goals and expected growth to ensure that the solution to your document processing needs can scale with your success. If yours is an industry that does not deal with data in unstructured documents, we can integrate robotic process automation into your document management system. If you do deal with unstructured documents or foresee your company expanding into areas that may bring more formats from which you will need to identify and extract information, we can look into intelligent document processing solutions.
At TEAM IM, our focus is identifying the customer’s current needs and putting a solution in place that will address those needs in a way that works in the present and offers scalability to keep your business operating optimally in the future.
Automated document processing is not just a way to make your processes run faster—it makes your whole organization run more efficiently. Speed is only the beginning. ADP allows you to identify, extract, categorize, and utilize data quickly, to be sure. But because you can incorporate important compliance steps into your automation while eliminating the risk of many types of human error, your document processing becomes exponentially more efficient than it ever could have been before.
And with intelligent document processing, your automations can continually adapt and improve through machine learning and artificial intelligence. You will be able to automate the processing of not only structured documents, but of processing information that comes in a table or an image or in the body of an email. Automated document processing encompasses a range of tools that make it easier for your organization to put your data to use. It brings benefits to a massive range of industries that can prove invaluable.
By working with us at TEAM IM, you can find the ADP solution that best fits your current needs and establishes a strong base for your future growth. No matter what your document management system looks like, we can help you integrate the right ADP technology for your company.
Don’t let your team operate with antiquated tools and processes—give them the resources to process documents faster and more efficiently than ever before.
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