Organisations whose back-office spends hours sorting through, classifying and extracting data from documents know how slow and tedious this work can be. With Intelligent Document Recognition, businesses are seeing the true benefits of automated document processing.

If you work for a company that processes a high volume of documents on a daily basis, you likely know the many pain points that are involved with converting these documents into digital ones. Processing takes hours of tedious work. Humans must scan then sort the documents, adding tags to each one so they can be stored and cross-referenced.

As you can imagine, this manual process is costly, error-prone, slow, and under-utilises valuable human resources. In other words, a headache!

Thanks to AI-powered technologies, however, these manual processes can be optimised in a way that speeds up processing time, increases accuracy, and drastically reduces the need for human intervention.

One of these technologies is Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR).

WHAT IS INTELLIGENT DOCUMENT RECOGNITION?

Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) is an AI-powered technology that can classify various types of structured or unstructured documents, store them in the correct category and format, and retrieve them for various purposes. (Here at Nexus, we also use the term ‘layout analysis model’.)

IDR makes use of rules-based AI models and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to characterise and classify documents in the correct way. Simply put, IDR allows you to scan or import different types of documents into a system without requiring having to do any prior sorting beforehand.

HOW DOES INTELLIGENT DOCUMENT RECOGNITION WORK?

IDR has three principal capabilities:

1. Classification: IDR can interpret information and patterns on documents and classifies them into various document types. If a document that has been scanned into the system has the word “payslip”, for example, then the software will automatically detect that it is handling a payslip. Of course, this is just a highly simplistic example. IDR software can classify more complicated and highly-detailed documents where various terms may be present, tagging each of the fields appropriately.
2. Extraction: After classification, IDR automatically extracts relevant data from the documents. The data extracted depends on the needs of each individual organisation. This data may be used to begin a business process or to populate an existing database such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
3. Release: The IDR software then exports the data into the workflow that the organisation has put in place, allowing for its immediate use.

The IDR software is also built with a set of learning rules, enabling it to undergo training and continuously improve the more you use it.

ADVANTAGES OF INTELLIGENT DOCUMENT RECOGNITION

IDR has proven itself to be highly useful for businesses with heavy back-office processes who want to streamline their operations. Some of the benefits of IDR are the following:

Higher speed

Ridding humans of the manual task of data-entry and checking, IDR saves time by automating a highly time-consuming process.

Increased accuracy

IDR uses validation techniques such as document layout and proximity and drastically decreases the chance of human error. This also decreases a company’s chances of breaching any regulatory compliance laws.

Lower costs

IDR curbs the costs involved with error-rectification and penalties incurred by non-compliance.

Better utilisation of human resources

With employees being freed up from mundane, repetitive tasks, they can focus their talents on higher-value tasks and decision-making.

Easier retrieval

IDR software allows users from any department or office to quickly and easily search for documents matching the criteria set by the user.

In summary, Intelligent Document Recognition can be a highly useful tool for any business dealing with vast amounts of documents. There are, of course, more complex IDR solutions that use more sophisticated AI and are highly flexible and can accommodate a wider range of necessities, but as this is a beginner’s guide, we’ll stop here for now.

If you want to learn more about how IDR can be leveraged to streamlining your business processes, get in touch with one of our representatives.  He or she will be more than happy to explain how Nexus FrontierTech’s Intelligent Document Processing helps organisations boost their efficiency.