Intelligent Document Processing: what it is and how it helps businesses with digital transformation

Today the business market is constantly enriched with new companies, new cases and also thousands of new documents. Enterprises are looking for solutions which help them to reduce costs of processes, especially in terms of documents processing. One of the most common approaches is Intelligent Document Processing – a technology which is conquering the business market of the 21st century. So, what is the famous IDP (Intelligent Document Processing), how does it differ from OCR and what benefits it allows for the enterprise – you can read about it in our article.

Table of contents

• The essence of Intelligent Document Processing
• How does Intelligent Document Processing work?
• Intelligent Document Processing vs Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Applications of Intelligent Document Processing
• Benefits achieved before implementing Intelligent Document Processing in the enterprise
• Case studies: Intelligent Document Processing in the biggest companies: KRUK and OCHK

The essence of Intelligent Document Processing

Market Research Future announces that 80% of all business data is embedded in unstructured formats like business documents, e-mails, images and PDF documents.

That’s why Intelligent Document Processing is a technology which is becoming more and more popular. This is confirmed by the analysts from Transparency Market Research who researched the size of the IDP market and predicted constant growth of IDP solutions. 

But what is this aspiring technology? IDP is an advanced system that can recognize and extract data from complex files. 

IDP relies on automating document handling processes. Main goal of this technology is data extraction from unstructured documents and transforming it into structured usable data. 

How does Intelligent Document Processing work?

IDP can handle any form of documents – whether documents are sent to the company by e-mail, are they located in the cloud, or maybe in paper form. The same versatility applies to the format – PDF, PNG or JPG – it has no meaning for the technology. 

IDP workflow consists of the 4 stages:

1. Preprocessing

The document goes through preprocessing and capturing of content. 

2. Classification

After uploading and reading the document, the technology classifies the information. It classifies the format, structure and type of documents. Thanks to Multimodal Deep Learning technology draws from three contextual sources: text, position on the page and visualization. 

3. Extraction

After classification, the system extracts relevant information and saves it in a structure chosen by user form. 

4. Validation

Finally, the IDP validates the correctness data and detects the inaccuracies of the extracted data. 

Intelligent Document Processing vs Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the technology working with many kinds of documents. It recognizes letters, numbers and other language-related characters from documents and converts them to editable form of digital files. 

This technology has been known since the early 80s but now it’s improved by the addition of Artificial Intelligence. OCR based on AI is exactly IDP.

IDP, in comparison to OCR, is a really complex technology. It understands the data, context, insights and generates a narrative. Thanks to Natural Language Processing it can also deal not only with simple structured documents but also with complex documents containing pictures, tables or signs. 

OCR uses rule-based or template-based extraction. The extraction on IDP is template-free and depends on content. It has the ability to adapt to changes. 

Using OCR, every converted document needs to be manually reviewed. Using IDP for most documents a full automation can be enabled because IDP is still learning and improving. Thanks to that we can achieve really high effectiveness. 

To sum up, Intelligent Document Processing solutions are capable of processing documents with greater accuracy and more flexibility than traditional OCR. The goals of both technologies are reading and extracting data but IDP brings us to the next level of automation.

Applications of Intelligent Document Processing

The possibilities of IDP are so wide, and the technology is so flexible that it is used in many industries and use cases. First of all, it is implemented in companies where hundreds or thousands of documents are processed per month.

IDP has found its place in the financial industry, where it helps to handle financial documents, and in the accounting industry, where it helps accountants process invoices.

There was room for IDP in the debt collection industry. IDP plays a key role in the skip tracing process, which helps streamline the debt recovery process.

IDP also works well in the analysis of complaints or in the handling of mailboxes and incoming correspondence.

Benefits achieved before implementing Intelligent Document Processing in the enterprise

First of all, IDP eliminates many problems related to human work. Employees will not have to manually browse through thousands of documents in order to classify them and extract the desired information – robots will do everything for them.

Implementing IDP in the enterprise also helps with faster document processing – thanks to this technology processes of document handling can be shortened by 70%. Finally it has an influence on the reduction of costs of the company. 

In addition, thanks to robots, tasks are performed perfectly and consistently. Accuracy and productivity are still improving what helps enterprises to achieve better results in many areas. 

Intelligent Document Processing in the biggest companies: KRUK, OCHK

More and more companies are using IDP. One of them is one of the largest debt collection companies in Poland – KRUK. 

KRUK was looking for the solution in terms of automation of the skip tracing process. They processed up to 400,000 pages of documents per month. 

Until now, the process of skip tracing was done manually, which was not conducive to process and cost optimization. Thanks to the IDP solution, searching for information in documents was automated and shortened the entire process by up to 2,5x. 

Find out more about IDP in KRUK. 

IDP also changed the life of the OCHK company which was looking for a solution for the classification of documents and the extraction of data contained therein. 

In this way, they wanted to automate repetitive processes in the organization related to the handling of invoices and other documents. Alphamoon’s solution achieved an efficiency of over 70%. 

Find out more about IDP in OCHK. 

If you want to find out more how IDP could help your enterprise, arrange to meet and try our DEMO! We will show you how to quickly implement a 96% effective system that will automate about 80% of repetitive activities in your organization.