Managing documents effectively is critical for businesses around the world. However, with the increasing amount of data, the drive for maximum efficiency, and compliance, privacy, and security issues, document management has become exceptionally difficult.
Now, companies need to rely on disrupting technologies, such as intelligent data capture to streamline the flow of information and handle documents effectively. In this article, we will what Intelligent Data Capture means and why it is important for effective document management.
5 Challenges in Document Management
Lacking Strategic Use of Data
Nowadays, data-driven measures have become a key factor of success for companies worldwide. Data is a strategic asset for businesses and allows them to analyze their performance, improve their existing workflows, and formulate future policies.
However, a company using paper-based document management lacks the tools to extract data from important documents and business processes. They cannot analyze information and gain crucial insights for effective decision-making, throwing them at a disadvantage.
Inefficient Routing and Tracking
A paper-based workflow is always significantly slower than an automated system. Effective routing and tracking of documents are not only important for FDA compliance but also for the performance of your business.
Manual routing and tracking of documents make it extremely difficult to collaborate efficiently. Consider a manufacturing site that has several buildings housing hundreds of employees who work different shifts 24/7.
In such situations, routing a document change request forms, for instance, means racing from one building to another while matching different shift timings. Tracking those forms is exceptionally difficult as well since they are at risk of being lost in tons of paperwork.
Divergent Workflows
Alongside the growth and sprawl of documents, employees are transitioning from traditional roles and processes to maximize productivity and accelerating workflows. Professionals are increasingly relying on new, specialized, technology-driven workflows that enhance collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing between workers.
At the same time, amongst social distancing measures, the workplace is becoming increasingly decentralized. Although these trends are creating value for businesses in a pandemic-hit world, they are also making communication and collaboration extremely challenging.
Declining Productivity
Nowadays, finding the right document, editing the correct version, and reducing the need to print/scan/attach documents to emails is necessary for efficiency. According to a recent study from IDC, productivity in companies is declining by 21.3% due to mismanagement of documents. Businesses urgently need to adopt new solutions to address issues effectively.
Lack of Security
Data protection and security are one of the five major concerns for businesses in 2020. With a decentralized system, it is extremely difficult for businesses to safeguard documents effectively. Documents in paper form are at huge risk of being stolen and cannot sustain the confidentiality of information.
Likewise, information stored digitally is vulnerable to attacks from cybercriminals. Most employees are unaware of essential security protocols while handling critical documents, whereas some don’t use the internet safely. Companies need secure software to store, publish, and share documents.
What Is Intelligent Data Capture?
Intelligent Data Capture is a technology that categorizes and sources information from both electronic documents and physical without extensive manual interference. It uses advanced AI-algorithms to deliver documents to authorized users and lets them extract data for routing information digitally.
How Does Intelligent Data Capture Work?
Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence that lets us create software applications that solve ongoing problems by analyzing data. These intelligent solutions require minimal to zero manual intervention and are useful in every field ranging from disease detection, customer service, self-driving cars, text classification, and much more.
In the context of Intelligent Data Capture, the combination of OCR and machine learning can become the driving force behind intelligent data capture. OCR is short for Optical Character Recognition, a technology that transforms digital documents into editable files with searchable text.
It works by using a specialized form of image detection algorithm to recognize characters in a digital document. Using OCR, businesses can digitally capture data from a range of documents such as PDFs, as well as scanned images.
Several industries ranging from medical records to banking, leverage this technology to process heavy loads of data. While OCR extracts data from digital documents and scanned images, advanced machine learning algorithms can analyze the structure of an invoice for patterns.
Working together, these solutions can classify data and differentiate between the due amounts and address numbers (as well as other types of information) accurately. Because of these technologies, professionals no longer need to worry about sending invoice data into correct fields for processing.
In the end, IDC helps organizations automate content consumption while accelerating routing of information to the relevant systems and users. Because of its automated nature, Intelligent Data Capture is a fundamental part of intelligent information processing.
How Intelligent Data Capture Resolves Core Challenges of Document Management
For companies that generate heaps of information routinely, processing information manually results in bottlenecks and creates unnecessary delays and error. This makes manual processes a huge obstacle for efficiency.
Nowadays, information is available in a plethora of sources, starting from scanned images, faxes, and emails to contracts, receipts, invoices, shipment documents, and claims. Intelligent Data Capture lets you gather data from a collection of diverse sources information, transform it into a digestible format, and automate the cumbersome procedure of information processing.
It enables companies to organize data alongside complete metadata, making it more accessible for AI-driven analytics, as well as business applications.
With the help of this structured information, companies can streamline key operational processes in various departments, helping companies extract relevant data more easily and deliver actionable insight to decision-makers.
According to research conducted by International Data Corporation, organizations leverage data and ensure the delivery of actionable information to decision makers can gain an additional $430 billion in productivity benefits over companies who don’t. Therefore, Intelligent Data Capture allows companies to outperform their competition and boost their revenue.
Intelligent Data Capture Benefits
The use of Intelligent Data Capture is prevalent across various industries and helps businesses of all sizes overcome challenges caused by manual document management.
Strategic Use of Data
Intelligent data capture can identify crucial information and deliver to relevant decision-makers in a timely manner. This helps companies enhance their business operations and use data strategically.
Reduced Overhead and Increased Efficiency
Intelligent data capture enables management to use human resources for business-critical tasks instead of manual data input and processing. At the same time, companies no longer have to deal with piles of paper.
Enhanced Collaboration between Remote Workers
Intelligent capture ensures collaboration between geographically distant employees and minimizes the company’s dependence on a shared location and similar work hours.
Augmented Security
Intelligent data capture routes content to the right directories as soon as possible, ensuring that only authorized members see the content. It also gives companies a swift and consistent deployment of security procedures, minimizing security breaches, and costly data loss.
Simplified Compliance
Intelligent data capture connects and matches documents to provided samples, ensuring that all documents meet all critical government regulations. The system also maintains accurate retention of records and confidential data.
Intelligent data capture is a revolutionizing technology that drives innovation, productivity, security, and compliance in your document management system. Using Intelligent Data Capture in your business can help you escape the burden of a paper-based workflow and maximize efficiency within your company.