Is Your Business Ready for Intelligent Document Processing?
tomas-gogar
The world has seen the damage a slow supply chain can do—it stunts economic growth, negatively impacts revenue, and leads to customer frustration, or worse, customer loss. Technology has been touted as the end-all to supply chain woes, but it can be difficult to determine the most beneficial solutions. Yet, one AI solution can lay the foundational groundwork for implementing future technologies: Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).
IDP eliminates back-office paper-pushing through automated data capture. Companies typically associate IDP with solving a document automation problem, but it really addresses a fundamental communication problem within the supply chain.
Here are three indicators to gauge if your company is ready to implement IDP.
1. The business relies on manual data entry. Manual data entry can be difficult and increases the likelihood of human error. In fact, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million annually, predicts Gartner.
IDP wipes out the need for manual data entry, saving businesses both time and money. Further, IDP ensures the most accurate and up-to-date information is company facing, which helps companies make the best business decisions.
Finally, manual data entry on large volumes of paperwork increases the likelihood that important invoices or requests will fall through the cracks. Late payments result, leading to lost revenue.
2. Intra-company communication is done through optical character recognition (OCR). Although OCR suffices for internal communication, it has limitations for automating workflows.
The mechanism responsible for pulling the information does not have the ability to read the information like a human would. Instead it uses the structure of the document to decipher information. This creates challenges when collaborating with companies with different organizational structures and document formatting. IDP offers a solution that turns unstructured data into structured information by scanning digital documents and converting written text to machine-readable data.
3. The business is undergoing growth. Scaling a business requires new technology and staff shuffling. New expenses arise, there’s a need for more employees, and the volume of work increases. Without implementing the right technology, scaling gets stunted by legacy systems that currently plague supply chains.
Incorporating IDP into a business model enables employees to focus on higher-level tasks. It also enables the company to take in more orders and produce better results for customers without sacrificing delivery time or service.
Further, scalability is an important tool for adjusting to sudden changes during busier seasons. Supply chain demands increase with customer expectations, and as the trend of online orders increases, the issue of scalability in logistical manufacturing will only be exasperated by customer expectations.
In today’s increasingly competitive economy, companies should consider IDP to help stay ahead of ongoing manual tasks that prevent executives from focusing on the bigger issues.