Author: Automation Hero

Jun 09, 2022 by Automation Hero

In 2020, the United Nations reported a “staggering rise” in natural disasters since the turn of the millennium — especially as a result of climate change. From 1980 to 1999, there were only 4,212 natural disasters recorded around the world. However, over the next two decades, this number climbed dramatically to a record 7,348 extreme weather events around the globe — killing 1.23 million people. What’s more, the number of natural disasters explicitly caused by climate change increased by 83% after 2000.

This increase spells trouble for the insurance industry, and it’s imperative companies find ways to not only minimize their costs but also allocate resources to process the increasing number of claims each year. Could intelligent document processing (IDP) be the key to offsetting the impact of higher claim volume?

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How does climate change impact insurance companies?

As the volume and severity of natural disasters increases, so do the costs of each disaster. A report by reinsurance company Munich Re found that natural disasters caused damages in excess of $210 billion in 2020. That’s more than the entire annual revenue of some P&C insurance providers.

Many companies are looking for ways to modify their business models to protect from increasing annual payouts, but this only addresses part of the problem. More disasters also increase the volume of claims to process, creating immediate issues with labor use, resource availability, and customer service. To address the bigger issues climate change creates for their industry, insurance companies need to quickly increase their efficiency.

How intelligent document processing can save catastrophe claims processing

No one can prevent natural disasters; we can only control how we respond. Claims adjusters are among the first people to be contacted in the event of property damage, so it’s incredibly important to respond compassionately — and efficiently. Unfortunately, many companies have not fully embraced the potentials of intelligent automation, contending with labor-intensive manual processes instead. As a result of this inefficiency, the high volume of claims after a natural disaster can dramatically increase costs and cause significant delays. Here’s how intelligent document processing platforms like Automation Hero help expedite claims processing, even in a disaster:

Automate data extraction from claims documents

Processing insurance claims is an incredibly document-heavy process, with many forms to review and file and a lot of information to verify. Intelligent document processing platforms use AI to automatically read, categorize, and capture data about policyholders, the damage they’ve incurred, costs, and more. This capability not only slashes document review times but also virtually eliminates data entry.

Streamline claims triaging

One of the biggest issues with manual processes is that high-risk claims don’t make it to the top of the pile for claims adjusters to resolve, leading to lost customers or even lawsuits. This is where the categorization capabilities of intelligent document processing platforms can help insurers more quickly and accurately prioritize incoming claims according to risk and urgency. AI can automate the claims triage by automatically reading email attachments so adjusters can focus on service or provide a valuable fail-safe to catch claims falling through the cracks of existing processes.

Respond more quickly to policyholders

Intelligent document processing platforms use AI to process common customer requests, so adjusters can focus on more complex issues. AI platforms like Automation Hero use email intent detection to prioritize the most sensitive customer requests. This focuses expert claims adjusters on the most urgent claims, rather than wasting their time on those that aren’t immediately vital to customers’ health and safety.

Scale to any disaster

As climate change causes higher volumes of natural disasters at unpredictable times, appropriate staff sizes can be incredibly difficult to maintain — either overhire and lose profits or underhire and increase risk. Outsourcing or hiring temporary contract claims processors creates major hassles and internal culture clashes for management teams and leads to customers being unsatisfied by less knowledgeable staff. AI, on the other hand, helps claims processing departments keep up with demand without dramatically altering the workforce.

The insurance industry has a long road ahead to figure out exactly how to respond to climate change. All of these intelligent automation capabilities dramatically reduce costs, so companies have more leftover to reinvest in strategies to minimize increasing risk. That’s why Automation Hero already has established a track record of increasing profits for insurance companies. Read our e-book to learn more about what our end-to-end solution can do for you.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.

• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Jun 08, 2022 by Automation Hero

Property and casualty insurance providers are no strangers to emergencies, especially since the number of  claims filed each year are rising significantly. A 2021 report by LexisNexis on home insurance trends found that extreme weather events drove catastrophe losses up 40% from 2019. The cost of wind damage payouts increased by an even higher 63% in that same time period.

As global temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, so does the frequency and severity of extreme weather events that cause property damage and bodily harm. As a result, the claims triages that get P&C insurance providers through busy seasons are becoming year-round, permanent fixtures. Without investment in AI and intelligent document processing (IDP) technology, these triages won’t be enough to keep up with processing catastrophe claims as climate chaos begins to impact our lives even more.

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The limits of catastrophe claims triage

Like triages at hospitals prioritize the most urgent emergencies, insurance triages are designed to route resources to the most important claims. For insurance companies still relying on heavily manual processes, the volume of claims from increasingly common extreme weather events could soon become completely overwhelming. Catastrophe claims triages break down because of the following:

Burdensome processes

Manually reviewing each first notice of loss (FNOL) and supporting documentation is incredibly time consuming. After a natural disaster and other emergencies with high damages, claims adjusters can spend entire days reviewing documents and organizing files, leaving no time to actually process claims.

Human error

The rush to close a high volume of claims, not to mention exhaustion and burnout, can make manual processes incredibly vulnerable to human error. Adjusters can easily miscategorize files or fail to properly prioritize claims, leaving distressed customers stuck — not to mention more likely to switch providers, dispute settlement offers, and take insurers to court.

Slow customer response times

Risk of compliance breaches and lawsuits increase dramatically when customers don’t receive prompt responses to their questions. Property damage can be as emotionally trying as it is expensive, so customers often need a personal touch from their insurance providers during these times. With claims adjusters so busy with draining, mundane document-related work, customer service can fall by the wayside.

How intelligent document processing levels up the catastrophe claims triage

For claims adjusters familiar with RPA and other legacy technology, it may seem impossible to automate document processing tasks — but that’s exactly what AI excels at. Automation Hero is leading a new generation of intelligent process automation platforms that streamline the most complex workflows in the insurance industry. The platform has a long track record of processing insurance claims, FNOLs, and other documents in a fraction of the time it takes human adjusters. Here’s how intelligent document processing helps P&C insurance providers:

Increases sorting accuracy

The advanced AI in intelligent document processing software can improve database accuracy by extracting information from multiple channels (email, texts, document scans) to sort them to the right databases, so teams get a jump start on processing claims. Administrative document tasks that could take human workers an entire day to complete can be done in moments.

Recognizes and extracts critical data

In addition to understanding what documents are, Automation Hero’s deep-learning AI can automatically extract essential information, such as the name of the policyholder, what’s been damaged, and how much it costs — without the need for any human review. Not only does Automation Hero cut down on the amount of reading each claim adjuster has to do but it can also process hundreds or even thousands of documents at once, helping teams handle unexpected claim volume after significant or unpredicted disasters.

Improves customer service

With AI handling so much mind-numbing work more quickly (and accurately), claims adjusters can do what matters: keep customers satisfied. They can focus on providing white-glove service to customers with the most expensive or complicated claims, reducing the likelihood of a lawsuit.

Intelligent document processing software can even recognize common customer requests in emails, such as asking for claim status updates or asking to change an address on file. Automation Hero can also automatically reply to requests or send them to a human based on the sender’s sentiment and tone. This capability speeds up response times so policyholders aren’t waiting on a human to get to their email and frees up claims adjusters to spend more time on complicated customer issues.

Automation Hero is optimized for the needs of insurance companies. With an advanced, deep-learning AI, it has already helped insurers like Kin, Baloise, and Markerstudy reduce their claims processing times, making it the perfect ally for scaling claims triages. Automation Hero has a proven track record of reducing costs for processing claims, reducing labor, and saving claims adjusters from burnout. Read our new e-book to see what else our AI can do for your insurance company.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.
• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Jun 03, 2022 by Automation Hero

The transformation underway in the industrial sector is unlike any we’ve ever seen before. The Third Industrial Revolution introduced the digitization of information, automated machinery, and other technological innovations. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) is about connecting all this new technology for levels of seamless collaboration we can’t yet fully imagine.

So far, the new industrial revolution has unfolded in two separate but parallel tracks. On one hand, manufacturing floors are incorporating more automated machinery on their floors. This comes in the form of fully autonomous equipment that enables lights-out, or unmanned, manufacturing, as well as collaborative robots that improve productivity. All of them generate incredible amounts of performance data, such as units per hour or cycle times, that create transparency, set benchmarks, and reveal potential areas for improvement.

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On the other hand, artificial intelligence-powered intelligent document processing technology is transforming the business side of manufacturing. AI eliminates or streamlines manual document-related tasks such as data capture, entry, and classification so employees are free to focus on higher-level work. The automation of document processing also allows organizations to quickly scale up operations without creating labor issues.

In Industry 4.0, AI is bringing these two parallel tracks together in an emerging field called enterprise intelligent automation. Some intelligent document processing platforms on the market are already capable of this type of automation

What is enterprise intelligent automation?

Enterprise intelligent automation is what Industry 4.0 is all about. It’s the process of systematically replacing manual processes with automation, creating greater connectivity between every process, system, and person in an organization. This connection streamlines processes even more to improve every KPI.

Traditional automation improves productivity and efficiency by eliminating bottlenecks, errors, and other delays of manual processes. Enterprise intelligent automation takes this even further by bringing disparate automated processes together for seamless workflows across departments and business units — even between sellers and customers. Removing human error from workflows also improves accuracy, compliance, and even security from data leaks. All these benefits combine to improve job satisfaction. When workers are free to focus on the work only humans can do, their jobs are much more engaging.

How intelligent document processing connects business units with the production floor

Automation has already improved productivity on the factory floor and in corporate offices. When enterprise intelligent automation unites the two through AI and automation, productivity increases exponentially. This cohesion even enables new benefits, like these:

Real-time productivity monitoring

When a manufacturing company can measure productivity on both the production floor and their offices, they can get a clear picture of their overall efficiency. At the granular level, this information can even reveal where bottlenecks occur between the factory and office side of the business. A long lag time between a company receiving an order and the factory gearing up for production could indicate issues with communication processes and lead to their refinement.

Supply chain optimization

One of the biggest causes of delay in manufacturing is the time gap between the factory running out of a material and the accounting department approving an order. With intelligent document processing, AI can seamlessly connect inventory management programs with accounting programs so funds for product reorders are automatically earmarked as soon as a material starts to run low.

More accurate revenue and cash flow forecasts

Seamless connections between accounting and other departments dramatically improve budget visibility. Stakeholders can see projected sales revenue in real time and compare it to purchase commitments from other departments, reducing miscommunication about budget needs and cashflow. What’s more, this type of cohesion streamlines accounting operations, improving both efficiency and profitability.

In the same way the Third Industrial Revolution was about easing the burden of manual processes in work, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is about easing the burden of managing different automation systems. Every company is undergoing a digital transformation at some point, but it can be easy to get distracted by flashy capabilities offered by different solutions. Find a tool that helps you focus on the ultimate goal of enterprise intelligent automation: guiding your decisions for lasting organizational impact.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.
• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

May 23, 2022 by Automation Hero

With premiums already at record highs, insurance companies are under incredible pressure to increase profit, but they may not be able to achieve this through higher revenue. The best strategy is to control costs through improved efficiency and bring order to unruly systems and processes. Out of all the phases of policy initiation and management, underwriting is the most challenging to streamline because of its central role in mitigating risk, and the complex tasks involved in doing it effectively.

Risk aversion is one of the core principles of insurance. As a result, many companies stick with safe but slow and outdated legacy systems that involve time-consuming manual labor, rather than risk trying to implement a better solution that doesn’t deliver as promised. These systems often create disconnected customer databases that make underwriting processes even more challenging.

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Even worse, slow insurance application processes can cause customers to jump ship and switch to newer, technology-first insurers that provide ultra-fast approval times. The solution insurance providers need is automation technology powered by artificial intelligence to augment their processes and remain competitive. 

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a new generation of automation technology that leverages AI to execute enterprise workflows more quickly. It’s what enables new “insure-tech” companies to process documents at high speeds. And legacy and traditional insurance providers don’t have to be left out of the digital revolution.

What is intelligent document processing (IDP)?

Intelligent document processing (IDP) has emerged as a critical part of an intelligent automation strategy. IDP technology was born out of the need for organizations to accurately extract data from documents. In essence, IDP leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to effectively handle and oversee document-centric business processes.

Through the adoption of IDP, insurance companies can optimize heritage document processes involving large volumes of documents to reduce manual effort, enhance precision, and reach their digital transformation goals.

A notable advantage of IDP is its seamless integration capability with other automation tools like robotic process automation (RPA). This compatibility with existing technologies enables companies to enhance their current automation strategies, leading to improved overall efficiency and expanded operational scope.

Optical character recognition (OCR)

Another advantage of IDP for insurers is its compatibility with OCR (optical character recognition). OCR is the technology that can read text within documents the same way humans do. However, unlike humans, OCR can recognize characters, numbers, letters, and words — in any font or language.

As you might expect, the most significant impact of OCR is on manual data entry tasks. OCR speeds up this essential business process and makes it convenient to turn words from scanned PDFs or images into text that can be edited or copied without manual retyping.

Even with the limitations of legacy OCR technology, it can help organizations streamline the digitalization of unstructured documents. According to performance benchmarks, Automation Hero’s patent-pending Context-aware OCR is 68% more accurate than ABBY’s Flexicapture and delivers 281% greater accuracy in terms of handwriting recognition.

The benefits of intelligent document processing in insurance underwriting

Research by Deloitte found that 74% of insurance companies expect to increase spending on AI in 2023, and almost as many plan to further invest in data analytics, cloud storage, and mobile technology. This smart investment allows companies to change their bottom lines. These are some of the benefits of intelligent document processing in insurance underwriting:

Improved risk assessment and pricing

Any company that collects data has more opportunities to use AI than ever before. This explosion of data has given underwriters more information to consider while creating policies, but they need AI to effectively use it all. Underwriters can pull information from virtually any database in their system without the need to go hunting through files. All they have to do is request data through the platform. With organized information at their fingertips, they can develop more comprehensive and accurate risk profiles and price premiums accordingly.

Faster approval times

Convenient access to data also dramatically improves processing times. Without AI, workers expend much energy on wasteful tasks involved in calculations, research, and other aspects of decision making. With AI, underwriters can quickly complete their risk assessment checklists, and efficiently reach conclusions, reducing approval times to a fraction of the manual process.

Deeply customized offerings

Intelligent document processing in insurance lets underwriters work with incredibly granular customer data. This empowers providers to create products that fit every kind of need or risk profile to minimize rejections. And since so much work in the underwriting process is done automatically, insurers can offer these custom products without slowing down processing times or increasing operating costs.

Make a bigger impact with end-to-end intelligent automation

AI-powered platforms enable incredible speed and accuracy for underwriting, but its capabilities can benefit every aspect of an insurance company. Users should look for platforms that specialize in document processing to solve problems in customer service, application review, claims processing, and even cross-selling.

Through intelligent document processing platforms like Automation Hero’s Hero Platform_, users can leverage AI to quickly process common customer requests, with functions that can detect the intent of emails and route them to the correct departments, extract data, organize attachments, and more. Intelligent document processing platforms also serve as a kind of connective fabric between all the CRM, ERP, accounting, database, and point solutions used across departments, helping underwriters access more information from disparate sources more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Underwriting has long been one of the most challenging parts of the insurance industry, but AI can dramatically streamline processing times and improve profit. As tech-first insurers become more popular, and legacy companies automate to keep up with them, intelligent automation will become the norm.

In fact, companies are already using platforms like Automation Hero, a versatile enterprise automation platform that leverages AI to streamline every document process — including underwriting. Explore the possibilities yourself with a free product demo.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.
• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

May 13, 2022 by Automation Hero

Supply chain teams have always operated under stressful conditions, but the crisis of the pandemic has taken an especially heavy toll — one many companies won’t recover from unless they address it directly. In 2021, the Harvard Business Review announced we were entering a new era of mental health awareness in the workplace, highlighting the importance of employers making structural changes to help employees maintain their wellbeing. Employer-provided counseling, mental health days, and other resources are going to become increasingly normalized, but we need to look at other ways to mitigate the ever-growing pressure for more productivity. In this new era, companies need to be sure their employees are working smarter, not just harder.

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We already know the impact intelligent document processing can have on efficiency but we don’t pay enough attention to its benefits for workers. In jobs that demand increasingly higher levels of output, managing repetitive, mundane tasks on top of high-level performance pressure can produce unnecessary stress and eventual burnout. Letting AI handle some of the manual labor that goes into office work can go a long way to break this cycle.

The limits of ERP systems

Much of the supply chain is managed with advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like Oracle and SAP, and over the years, this technology has enabled massive breakthroughs in productivity and efficiency. Unfortunately, these systems still leave gaps in automated workflows, even though they demand a lot of resources to manage and implement. Their high costs also make them unattainable for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Aside from demand, the biggest cause of stress for procurement and freight forwarding teams over the past few years has been the constant search for alternative suppliers and shipping routes as constraints pile up across the globe. Large ERP systems are amazing for creating and managing stable supply chain environments, but their inflexibility makes remapping workflows incredibly difficult, and it takes a lot of manpower to implement change. They also have limited document processing capabilities, which still leaves workers with a lot of paperwork to manage.

Intelligent document processing: The hero procurement and freight forward teams need

Intelligent document processing allows organizations to create complete end-to-end automation workflows across their entire enterprise with the power of advanced artificial intelligence. Automation Hero is a new AI platform built from the ground up to help users streamline mundane document processing, scale up to full enterprise automation, or just improve any process in between. How does this help procurement or freight forwarding teams?

Data extraction

With the supply chain moving at breakneck speeds, anything freight forwarding teams do to shave minutes from a process translates to massive time savings. Automation Hero’s advanced data extraction optical character recognition (OCR) can virtually eliminate the need for manual document review and data entry by extracting data from common documents like contracts, BOLs, and RFIs, as well as emails, forms, and any channel where communication occurs.

Supply chain visibility

Workflow automation needs data to function as intended. Paper documents are still incredibly common in supply chains — especially “in the field” on factory floors, warehouses, and border checkpoints. Using paper also creates bottlenecks and data blind spots throughout the supply chain. As long as workers scan and upload these documents in a timely manner, Automation Hero can extract their data and eliminate the blindspots, without procurement teams within organizations having to revamp all their processes.

Workflow insight and flexibility

Effective supply chain management is most akin to what software developers call exception handling, where programs have to respond to special conditions and process them accordingly. In today’s supply chain chaos, procurement and logistics teams are constantly forced to find new suppliers and make changes to routes. ERPs are simply not built for this.

Automation Hero, on the other hand, empowers a single worker to extract historical data from their systems and have the AI analyze it to quickly find alternative solutions to a problem. From there, users can update and redeploy workflows in a fraction of the time and resources it would take with an ERP. This helps small- and medium-sized companies operate with as much power as a large enterprise, without the need for as much manpower.

Intelligent process automation for a stronger supply chain

The supply chain has been a nightmare for the past two years, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to end any time soon. Really taking care of mental health will require more than counseling and other support resources. Managers need to alleviate as much of the conditions creating information overload and decision fatigue as possible. Intelligent document processing platforms, like Automation Hero, are just what the doctor ordered to help supply chain professionals sleep easier at night and navigate the new normal. Learn how we can help you manage supply chain chaos in our new e-book.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.
• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Mar 15, 2022 by Automation Hero

Accounts payable isn’t glamorous, but invoice approvals and payments are the bedrock to running a successful business. That’s why it needs to happen quickly and accurately. Yet, manual invoice approvals are incredibly time consuming and labor intensive — especially in high volumes.

Robotic process automation (RPA) began to lessen this burden when it entered the market in the early 2000s. The technology promised to create a “digital workforce” that could replace humans for much computer-based work, but failed to deliver much of it, especially in terms of document-based workflows.

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In the 2010s, intelligent document processing (IDP) was created to automate many of the tasks that RPA could not. Powered by artificial intelligence, IDP can read documents, extract information, and even contextualize it, reducing the burden on human workers to read and process an endless pile of invoices. Essentially, IDP reads an invoice, knows who sent it, and how much is being requested. According to a Business Insider report, just this simple automation has improved processing efficiency by 73% compared to manual handling. What’s more, IDP has helped some organizations reduce AP department costs by 81%.

Entering the intelligent process automation era

The 2020s have introduced another upgrade to automation. Dubbed intelligent process automation (IPA), this new generation of technology unifies the capabilities of RPA and IDP into one platform, or suite of tools, and leverages AI to further refine workflows and improve efficiency.

Essentially, intelligent process automation offers the potential to fully automate every business process, even extending into the way leadership makes decisions. On the granular level, the benefits of intelligent process automation can impact the way accounts payable departments operate.

Intelligent document processing for AP departments

The benefits of intelligent process automation affects nearly every aspect of AP department operations, from approving invoices to managing databases. Here are four of the most impactful capabilities:

1. More efficient invoice capture

Automated invoice processing can supercharge your invoice processing with intelligent document processing. Leveraging natural language processing and AI, IDP can automatically process invoices from every type of channel and extract the contents as structured data. This is great for organizations that accept invoices via email, as intelligent document processing can read the intent of messages, automatically download attached invoices, and process them without the need for a human to even open the email.

2. Faster approval speeds

Since intelligent document processing platforms can read and contextualize all the information in a document, they can understand who submitted each invoice, how much is being requested, and what service was rendered.

With access to a purchase order database or ERP system, platforms can even automatically verify the invoice is accurate and route it for payment — all in a matter of seconds rather than the minutes it would take a worker to manually process.

3. Limitless integrations

Another benefit of intelligent document processing is how seamlessly it can connect with other software through APIs. AP departments often leverage a number of tools for different tasks, and users must manually reformat or transfer data between them. IDP can create more unified workflows by automating this work so AP employees can focus on higher-level (and higher value) tasks. This could allow users to fully automate the invoice approval process, from capture to fund disbursement.

4. Easier auditing

Errors, audits, and process reviews are a fact of life in accounts payable. IDP tools can automatically log every step of each workflow for easy review. AI can even spot where potential bottlenecks or workflow breakdowns may happen. Manually auditing processes is also easier since so many can be managed through a unified invoice processing solution.

Invoicing processing has always been a critical operation for successful businesses, but it takes considerable resources. Fortunately, the benefits of intelligent document processing can transform accounts payable operations so organizations can achieve new heights of profitability.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.
• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Mar 15, 2022 by Automation Hero

Office work has come a long way since the days of typewriters, paper memos, and secretarial pools. Most of the time-consuming manual labor traditionally associated with office work is now just nostalgia. Computers have forever altered the way we communicate and store files and the types of work humans are even needed for.

Since the advent of business automation tools at the turn of the millennium, office labor expectations have continued to change, especially as the technology becomes more advanced. Now dozens of automation tools streamline specific processes or help manage entire enterprises. In the 2020s, you can automate virtually any process — the trick is to determine which automation tool best meets your needs.

These are the most popular automation tools and capabilities and their best use cases:

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Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

What It Is: Optical character recognition (OCR) technology scans documents and images and converts their text into formats computers can process. OCR examines each pixel to identify the shapes of individual letters and numbers. Newer iterations are able to recognize handwritten letters and numbers.

What It’s Best For: Since OCR can automatically convert images into editable text, it can streamline or even eliminate manual data entry, save for quality control review ​​that’s required for your digital transformation initiatives.

The technology also makes text editable. Copying and pasting information from scanned documents is impossible without OCR. But when converted, the text can be used and edited in word processors and other programs.

With its incredibly wide potential for application, OCR has a use case in virtually every organization — especially those that involve inputting information from printed forms into databases.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

What It Is: Robotic process automation (RPA) uses in-software “robots” to replicate human actions on computers so manual labor is no longer necessary.

The technology works by following a custom script or sequence of actions, such as opening documents, copying files, typing text, and clicking buttons or specific points on a screen. The software follows simple, linear flows, but users can automate more complex projects by inserting branch points that activate different workflow sequences based on conditional logic.

What It’s Best For: Like OCR, RPA has a wide array of applications. Because it streamlines any sort of repetitive task performed on computers, nearly every industry, department, and type of business process can use it. Some of the most common applications for RPA are in invoice processing, payroll, approvals, database management, sorting documents, and processing sales orders.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

What It Is: Artificial intelligence is a continually evolving science that builds smarter or intelligent systems to augment human performance and eventually replace labor. By using natural language processing to “understand” the meaning of documents or text, and take intelligent action, AI can automate data analysis, understanding, and even some decision making.

What It’s Best For: Organizations that want to automate advanced or complicated processes or make their existing systems more efficient benefit most from AI. When augmenting OCR, AI can more accurately read documents and format information into usable data. While standalone OCR can miss letters and reformat text as incomplete words, AI can intuitively fill in missing information to avoid misspelled words and other errors that require human intervention.

Intelligent Process Automation (IPA): An automation tool for every use case

Artificial intelligence has given rise to the next generation of automation: intelligent process automation. In this framework, AI can automate entire business functions rather than automating different tasks with standalone automation tools. Intelligent process automation improves the relationships between tasks to further streamline and automate workflows and reduce labor. New IPA systems offer these capabilities in one end-to-end platform while integrating with other software to create cohesive, uninterrupted workflows between different tools.
Automation has already drastically altered the business landscape. Gartner reports that investment in AI and automation technology will reach $596.6 billion this year. Companies that aren’t undergoing a digital transformation risk being left behind by competitors as well as consumers. Platforms that enable IPA will be the best automation investment for organizations to stay ahead of competition.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP): A critical automation tool for documents

What It Is: Intelligent document processing (IDP) has emerged as a crucial element within the wider automation landscape. IDP technology was born out of the need for organizations to accurately extract data from documents. In essence, IDP leverages artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to effectively process documents with above-human accuracy and oversee document-centric business processes.

What It’s Best For: Through the adoption of IDP, organizations can optimize business processes involving a large volume of documents to reduce manual effort, enhance accuracy, and reach their digital transformation goals. A notable advantage of IDP is its seamless ability to integrate with other automation software tools like robotic process automation (RPA). This compatibility with existing technologies enables companies to augment their existing automation tools with modern AI, leading to improved overall efficiency and expanded operational scope.

What is an automation strategy?

What It Is: An automation strategy is a comprehensive plan that guides an organization’s deployment and utilization of automation technologies. It provides a clear roadmap for an organization’s automation journey, helping to ensure a successful transition and maximize the benefits of automation. This plan should align with the organization’s overarching business objectives, ensuring that automation initiatives contribute effectively to the achievement of those goals. 

What It’s Best For: An effective automation strategy identifies processes that are suitable for automation, selects appropriate automation tools, considers the potential impact on employees, and establishes metrics for assessing the success of the automation efforts. It also incorporates plans for managing change and up-skilling employees to work effectively with new technologies.

No matter where you are on your automation journey, Automation Hero is here to make sure that you have the information you need to make the right decision for your organization.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.

• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Mar 09, 2022 by Automation Hero

The saying goes that nothing is certain but death and taxes. But in business, document processing is equally inescapable. For the entire history of office work, organizations have had to devote considerable resources to managing document workload.

Dedicated employees, and in some cases, entire departments, have been responsible for manually reviewing applications, forms, requests, and other documents, inputting missing data and routing to other employees for further processing. Document work can be incredibly tedious, time consuming, and prone to error.

Fortunately, the burden began to lift in the 2000s with the advent of robotic process automation (RPA). This technology claimed to create “digital workers” that could replicate human actions performed within the computer screen. Though vendors oversold on RPA’s capabilities, it did help automate many mundane, non-document centric tasks. Later, optical character recognition (OCR) enabled computers to read scanned documents to reduce the need for manual data entry, but accuracy was incredibly low.

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RPA vendors sold the dream of a digital workforce that could handle document understanding, but they delivered tools much too simple for the task. In the last decade, AI has advanced enough to begin delivering on these promises with a new type of automation: intelligent document processing (IDP). This enabled automation systems to not only extract data from documents but also contextualize and analyze it for further processing without the need for human attention.

IDP is ushering a new wave of automation — finally relegating the drudgery of document processing to the past.

A giant leap forward

Whereas RPA and IDP by themselves focused on automating specific parts of business processes or document lifecycles, intelligent process automation looks at business operations as one cohesive workflow — and deploys artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate as much of it as possible. When a program is billed as an intelligent process automation solution, it usually encompasses the full capabilities of OCR, RPA, and IDP.

Supercharge document processing

While this potential might sound lofty, intelligent process automation technology already offers relief from the detailed work of document processing. It improves efficiency so much that organizations achieve drastic savings in little time. In fact, Bain & Company, a global business consulting firm, reports average cost savings of 20% to 25% for finance organizations that leverage intelligent process automation. 

Here’s how it helps:

AI-powered optical character recognition and data extraction

Business documents come in every format, including paper forms, PDFs, and emails. The AI-driven optical character recognition (OCR) deployed in intelligent document processing can read all of them. Context-aware OCR clearly understand every word with greater accuracy and speed than humans. This is even becoming the case with handwriting.

Automate any process

Intelligent process automation technology is designed to automate everything — even work that isn’t traditionally thought of as a candidate for automation. The customer service sector is seeing incredible benefit from AI that can read and detect the intent of emails. Previously, workers had to diligently read each message from customers, respond, and take action. Now AI with natural language processing can derive meaning to route requests to specific departments, response to quote requests, and other responses that traditionally required considerable energy and time.

Enables complete end-to-end automation

Previously, automation capabilities were siloed, with organizations piecing together workflows across a number of platforms and tools. Inevitably, this required a certain level of manual handling and skilled integration work to move data between systems. Intelligent process automation solutions such as intelligent document processing can integrate seamlessly with almost any type of software, eliminating the need for manual intervention.

Each decade brings incredible advancements in AI and automation technology, and we are quickly entering the era of AI taking over how we even implement automation. The business community is only beginning to realize the potential of intelligent document processing. Unlocking it begins with supercharging all document processing workflows.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.

• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Mar 09, 2022 by Automation Hero

When business culture changes for the better, it’s not long before we forget what things used to be like.

At the turn of the millennium, software developers used the insights they gleaned from business process management (BPM) to start deploying automation. The earliest form, robotic process automation (RPA), entered the market in the early 2000s and gave organizations a “digital workforce” that could drastically scale up productivity. RPA could automate repetitive tasks performed on a computer as long as it didn’t require complex decision making. It eliminated much repetitive work but had limited capabilities and was complex to implement.

In the 2010s, artificial intelligence advances helped create intelligent document processing (IDP) technology, which can automate much of the work of data extraction and classification. Previously, workers could only automate simple, mundane actions — with workers needing to complete the initial data input. IDP let organizations use machine learning to read and understand documents, automating the “pre-work” needed for RPA to take action on.

Now in the 2020s, another revolution in automation and business processes is underway.

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A new era

Intelligent automation, sometimes referred to as intelligent process automation (IPA), is the next phase of business automation. IPA unites the capabilities of RPA, IDP, and AI to streamline and scale decision-making across entire organizations, simplifying processes, freeing mental and physical labor and improving agility.

With intelligent automation, organizations deploy RPA and IDP to automate the most mundane business processes. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technology ensure accurate extraction and even analyze operational data to find more opportunities for efficiency.

How does intelligent document processing (IDP) factor in?

Intelligent document processing has emerged as a crucial element within the wider automation landscape. In essence, IDP leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to effectively handle and oversee document-centric business processes. Through the adoption of IDP, organizations can optimize business processes involving a large volume of documents to reduce manual effort, enhance precision, and reach their digital transformation goals.

A notable advantage of IDP is its seamless integration capability with other automation tools like RPA. This compatibility with existing technologies enables companies to enhance their current automation strategies, leading to improved overall efficiency and expanded operational scope.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Intelligent document processing also plays nicely with other technologies such as OCR. OCR (optical character recognition) is the technology that can read text within documents the same way humans do. However, unlike humans, OCR can recognize characters, numbers, letters, and words — in any font or language.

As you might expect, the most significant impact of OCR is on manual data entry tasks. OCR speeds up this essential business process and makes it convenient to turn words from scanned PDFs or images into text that can be edited or copied without manual retyping.

Even with the limitations of legacy OCR technology, it can help organizations streamline the digitalization of structured documents. According to performance benchmarks, Automation Hero’s patent-pending Context-aware OCR is 68% more accurate than ABBY’s Flexicapture and delivers 281% greater accuracy in terms of handwriting recognition.

How intelligent automation improves document processing

Regardless of a particular implementation, organization, or industry, intelligent automation transforms each process it impacts. Sometimes, it even changes the nature of work that employees are expected to do. Here are a few ways intelligent automation can improve an organization’s document processing:

Tighter compliance and security

The volume of documents organizations need to process is increasing right alongside the number of regulations they’re expected to follow. Especially in the finance and health care industries, users must follow rigid procedures to prevent compliance and data breaches that expose them to penalties and liabilities.

Automation minimizes risk by handling strict procedures humans are prone to deviate from. Even better, it minimizes human error, even when compliance isn’t an issue. 

Greater scalability

In the past, business growth hinged on labor availability. A sudden influx of customers could cause delays while more workers were hired to handle increased volume, slowing down or capping growth in the process. Now, automation systems can handle virtually any increase in work without the need to hire more employees to keep up with demand. This allows organizations to undergo incredible growth without major resource crunches. 

Happier workers

Many pre-automation business processes and tasks required people to act like machines. Freeing them of those burdens lets them focus on more satisfying tasks, and provide greater benefit to the company. In fact, a 2021 Salesforce survey found that 89% of workers are more satisfied with their jobs as a result of automation.

More satisfied customers

In our convenience-driven digital economy, consumers prize speed and accuracy in the companies they do business with. Implementing intelligent automation can drastically improve response times to customer support queries, application processing, approvals, refunds, and virtually any task that involves processing documents.

Organizations that implement intelligent automation now are poised with incredible efficiency to stand heads and shoulders above the competition in their fields. As the technology is more widely adopted, intelligent automation may soon be a requirement to remain competitive at all. Implementing now is critical to improve existing workflows, as well as to future-proof operations.

Unlock the intelligence in your documents with our AI-driven automation today

Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

• Speak with an expert — tell us about your specific use case.
• Get a personalized demo — schedule a demo, and our Heroes will get in touch!

Jan 19, 2022 by Automation Hero

Growing pressure for profit, skilled labor shortages, and competition from the fintech industry have combined to put immense pressure on financial services and banking institutions. Now, maximizing efficiency and reducing costs isn’t just a goal — it’s mandatory for organizations to thrive. Robotic process automation (RPA) has transformed the way these organizations get work done, but a new generation of intelligent process automation solutions are taking these benefits even further. 

In the past, projects involving customer onboarding, reporting, loan processing, opening accounts, and other basic functions, were incredibly cumbersome and labor intensive. When know your customers (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance processes became more intense after 9/11, these challenges became even worse. RPA allowed banks to hand over the most time-consuming tasks to an unseen “digital workforce,” that completes processes more quickly and with greater accuracy, without incurring additional labor expenses or losing motivation.

This has set the financial services industry on a completely new trajectory. McKinsey found that RPAs can “fully automate” about 42% of finance activities, and “mostly automate” an additional 19% of tasks. Now, most companies in the financial services sector are automating half of their business processes, leading to massive savings. In fact, Everest Group found that the top implementers of RPA have earned nearly 4x on their investments. 

RPA is no longer enough

Unfortunately, RPA still leaves a lot of grueling work to be done manually, especially in terms of document processing. While RPAs can automate tasks like approvals or routing, a lot of the initial capture and data extraction must still be done manually, requiring human workers to get data properly formatted for the RPA to actually process. This can be a huge drain on time and other resources, and bog workers down from doing more important, revenue-driving tasks. 

Projects involving customer support, responding to emails, approving applications, and organizing paperwork can slow to a crawl. This can have a major impact on customer satisfaction — especially as front end processes become easier and faster thanks to the proliferation of responsive fintech apps. 

How intelligent process automation closes the gaps

Fortunately, next wave automation platforms like Automation Hero are emerging to streamline data extraction. After RPA, software engineers began developing intelligent document processing (IDP) platforms that could automate input processes. These systems use optical character recognition (OCR) to “read” virtually every kind of document (including images), extract data, and format it for processing by users or RPAs.

Automation Hero is versatile enough to extract data from virtually any kind of document, including PDFs, emails, Word documents, scanned contracts, digital forms, and beyond. This lends the platform a number of incredible use cases, including:

• Detecting the intent of emails to quickly route customer requests and pull relevant data.
• Approving transactions more efficiently by eliminating manual processing. 
• Processing ​​GDPR Subject Access Requests with ultra-fast AI data validation.
• Classifying documents automatically with intelligent character recognition. 
• Finding cross-selling and upselling opportunities for products such as mortgages and home insurance. 

Beyond providing these IDP capabilities, Automation Hero serves as a complete end-to-end solution that can act upon the data it extracts from documents for further processing and routing. In fact, Automation Hero’s advanced, deep learning AI can complete the entire document cycle and learn to improve its own performance over time. 

Most importantly, none of this comes at the expense of an organization’s existing systems. As an intelligent process automation solution, the platform can integrate seamlessly with another RPA to fill in performance gaps until customers have the time and resources to transition out of it. Once ready, Automation Hero can work as an entire enterprise AI system with even more capabilities than other solutions. 

Automating processes in the financial services industry can be incredibly challenging, with so much red tape and compliance to navigate, but Automation Hero meets customers exactly where they are for a frictionless process.