Category: Uncategorized

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!

Mar 03, 2022 by Brodrick Lacy

“We can understand it and automate it.”

It was an honor to have our EMEA VP of Sales, Mark Stripp, invited to Plug and Play Tech Center’s Fintech & Enterprise Europe 2022 Start-up panel. He offered spectacular points as to how automation has advanced to fit the needs of businesses, and just how Automation Hero came to be in the enterprise tech industry. Below are critical takeaways and memorable milestones for our company:

Since being founded in 2017, we have helped companies globally reach over 70% increased efficiency in their customer-facing business processes. 

We have an incredible roster of companies that we’ve worked with (and continue to work with), including Baloise, Carrier, Kin, SDI LABS, Sysco, and Halwell Mutual. 

Takeaways from Mark Stripp 

The problem:  “If you take an existing use case, invoice processing, and classic automation. Today the paradigm is creating templates, and that’s quite costly because there’s a number of different types of templates out there-and with so many structured and unstructured data.”

The solution: “How we approach it through our deep learning capabilities is that we’re able with enough examples, and clean data, and variants – to actually train a model so that it’s form type agnostic. So, it doesn’t matter what type of invoice processing document it is; we can understand it and automate it, and that’s what we feel is a bit of  a game-changer in what’s going into the next stage of automation….”

Case study: A company found that they couldn’t leverage their data, and this was due to error-prone technology incapable of extracting unstructured data and lengthy manual entry processes.

Once integrating our end-to-end platform, this company experienced an overall improvement of over 20% efficiency for its document processing, resulting in about $3M in annual savings.

Feb 08, 2022 by Dan Campbell

Automation is improving customer satisfaction through email management

Did you know that 95% of customers who’ve had a bad customer service experience indicated they would share that experience with someone else (“Bad Customer Service Interactions More Likely to be Shared Than Good Ones”)! And if they don’t share their bad experience, another study showed that 91% of customers who don’t complain will simply leave after a bad experience (“12 Call Center Best Practices”). This means you want to avoid an unhappy customer at all costs – your brand literally depends on it. 

So, what are some factors leading to bad customer experiences? Well for one, the number of times a caller is transferred to a different agent was correlated with the increased rate of customer dissatisfaction. This means it’s imperative to get the customer to the right agent the first time. Secondly,  having to wait too long to receive a response, we’ve all been there I’m sure, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Using the right tooling, companies can lessen these frustrating factors by speeding up the entire service cycle to get customers what they want and need, faster. Ultimately, the most successful companies are those that pride themselves on customer service and we want to be your partner on that journey.

Now, how can our Hero Platform_ help you? Using state of the art (AI) artificial intelligence, our platform can quickly produce workflow models, and understand the intent of emails as they arrive. Allowing you to assign the customer to the appropriate agent/center, or if necessary respond instantaneously to a time sensitive matter. With the Hero Platform_ you’re not just getting accuracy and speed, but the ability to ensure that the customer is heard! Avoiding altogether the IVR system many customers would rather avoid. Using state of the art AI, we can quickly produce models that can understand the intent of emails as they arrive so that you can not only get customers to the right person, but also possibly reply to the customer near instantaneously to let them know you hear them and avoid them an encounter with the IVR system (which many customers would rather avoid altogether). Have a look at the scenario below for some examples on how we do this.

Problem

A multinational company is inundated with inbound requests from their many customers who have recently moved. Currently, expected response times for the company are within the 24-48 hr range, but occasionally it can take up to 3 or more days! This leads to many people calling in and waiting on an automated call system that frustrates them as they just want to be done with the request and get on with their day. In the company’s current process, the agents are sorting through so many emails that it is hard to understand which inbound emails require a reply and which do not. 

Solution

Using the Hero Platform_ near real time monitoring of the inbox, emails are ingested, their intent are identified to understand if the email is related to an address change request. The actual content of the email is inspected and an entity extraction model attempts to pull out the new address. If the extraction process is successful, then a reply is sent to the customer indicating that the company has not only received their email, but furthermore has already begun the address change request process. Behind the scenes, the Hero Platofrm_ actually updates the individual’s address in the CRM system (in this case, Salesforce) so that there is one less item for an agent to process. If the extraction does not fully complete, then an email is still sent to the customer informing them their email was received, but additionally, a task is generated for an agent to check the given email. 
ROI: This automation reduces a process that would normally take 24 hrs to contact a lead to 10 minutes following the customer’s initial email. automation takes what might otherwise be a 24 hr lead time and engages the customer within 10 minutes of their original email. While this is a measurable improvement in response time, the customer satisfaction gains are priceless. Keep in mind that surveys indicate more than 80% of customers are willing to pay anywhere between a 10-20% a premium on  a product or service that has a better customer experience (Cook). So not only is there an increase in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), but an increase in customer retention as well. From a more practical perspective there was an estimated 8,000 hours saved a year on this particular request (across all contact center agents). This leads to an approximate 50% ROI on just this one use case. The best part about Hero Platform_,however, is that the ROI continued to increase as other use cases were built out into flows.

Jan 19, 2022 by Automation Hero

Robotic process automation (RPA) as we know it is only 20 years old, but the field of business automation has already undergone a number of evolutions. At the turn of the millennium, RPA changed the baseline for productivity in the office by allowing organizations to “outsource” their most repetitive and time-consuming tasks to software. Later, intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions entered the market to help organizations tackle tasks RPA couldn’t automate — particularly data extraction and recognition.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become important to the field of enterprise automation, allowing machines to handle more complex work and further improve labor utilization. This has given rise to a new level of automation called intelligent process automation (IPA), which has the potential to transform organizations. While RPA and IDP handle specific types of work and process, IPA could automate almost every task that doesn’t involve human creativity. However, not all enterprise AI is created the same. 

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What’s missing without true AI

Many legacy RPA and IDP platforms claim to leverage AI in their toolkits, but unless machines are making informed decisions and improving processes over time, it’s not true AI. A new generation of intelligent process automation platforms, like Automation Hero, leverage the power of AI in every stage of the document processing lifecycle:

• Recognition: Using a high-accuracy OCR that can read information from any kind of document, including handwriting. 
• Understanding: Processing and categorizing the data it extracts. 
• Analysis: Utilizing machine-learning techniques to glean insight into the data and existing processes.
• Action: Automating the appropriate response or workflow based on the data extracted.

True AI enables a number of benefits that can transform the way industries automate when compared to traditional RPAs and IDPs, including:

Accurate models and workflows with zero training

In the past, users had to manually build workflows to process documents and complete tasks, requiring a lot of trial and error, and a major drain on resources. Automation Hero’s AI can look at historic process data to build detailed and accurate workflows without human hand-holding. Even where no process data exists, the platform can build robust automations with less training than other solutions, and an efficient troubleshooting process. 

Truly intelligent process automation (IPA)

The right way to do something now might not be the right way to do it tomorrow — especially as technology advances and the pace of business accelerates. Automation Hero’s true AI can analyze processes (including those you haven’t automated) and identify opportunities for improvement. Best of all, this is done without upgrading services or moving to higher pricing tiers. Automation Hero follows a consumption-based pricing model that charges users only for the automations they use, as they use them.

Intelligent document processing (IDP)

Intelligent document processing has emerged as a critical AI tool 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) and natural language processing (NLP) to effectively process any kind of document and oversee document-centric processes. Through the adoption of IDP, organizations can optimize 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 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.

DIY deployment

Automation Hero’s true AI doesn’t just improve business processes and efficiency — it creates a positive and easy user experience. The platform walks each user through the creation of advanced AI models and complex workflows from conception to deployment, without the need for expensive IT support. This lets IT teams focus on maintaining their company’s digital infrastructure, and puts the power to manage workflows into the hands of workers who will benefit from them the most. 

Graduate to intelligent document processing with true AI

While RPA has transformed organizations, the legacy systems no longer reflect the forward motion of automation. In fact, limiting your organization to these old-guard solutions could be holding your company back from making a greater impact on the market.

Automation Hero’s AI platform makes it easy to implement full end-to-end intelligent process automation with the versatility for companies to deploy the technology in a way that best suits them. Many customers use the platform to augment their existing processes without doing a complete overhaul. This is the greatest benefit of true AI: It works for you, rather than asking you to work for it. 

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.

Jan 17, 2022 by Automation Hero

When robotic process automation (RPA) systems were introduced to the business world in the early 2000s, they saved workers from some of the most mundane work imaginable. Things that now seem to happen automatically, like paychecks hitting accounts or emails notifying that an order has been received, used to require diligent execution by human workers. 

Without a doubt, RPA has improved the way we live and work. But automation’s capabilities have advanced far beyond what legacy RPA can offer. Newer technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent document processing (IDP) have combined to offer complete end-to-end automation services, increasingly referred to as intelligent process automation. 

Even if you’re pleased with your current RPA solution, if that’s all you’re using, you’re leaving an unprecedented level of efficiency and cost savings on the table.

What you’re missing without intelligent process automation

Platforms like Automation Hero that use intelligent process automation combine the best aspects of RPA, IDP, and AI into one single, cutting-edge product. While many systems out there added some of these features throughout the years as they became available, Automation Hero was built from the ground up with these capabilities. Some of the most noteworthy benefits include: 

Fast and frictionless implementation

If you were at the company when your RPA was initially set up, you probably remember how much time and money it took just to get it up and running. Legacy RPA operates off of diligently built templates, and any deviation could result in complete system failure. Meanwhile, intelligent process automation platforms like Automation Hero are easy to set up and deploy, with no need for coding, or even IT support. 

AI models built with zero or minimal training

The deep learning AI that runs Automation Hero is so advanced that it can simply look at your historic process data to build accurate and effective automations. Even better, the platform can leverage its growing insight over time to improve processes and identify other opportunities for streamlining as well. Best of all, even if you’re starting from scratch, the platform can build robust workflows with virtually no input or pre-training. 

A full end-to-end platform

Some legacy RPAs have grown over time to offer IDP and other more advanced features as they’ve become available. However, a great number of RPA systems haven’t changed at all. One way workers overcome those limitations is purchasing separate IDP and other automation programs, and finding ways to incorporate them into their existing processes. This can create a number of challenges that can eat up significant time and resources — both in initial setup and to fix inevitable problems that arise. Automation Hero offers all of the most advanced IDP and AI functionality in its core build. No upgrades necessary, and no need to purchase add-ons or product expansions. 

Near limitless integrations

Automation Hero features an unparalleled number of integrations with third-party applications, including email programs, file management systems, and databases, allowing users to create automations for virtually every area of their business. Beyond just document processing and workflow management, Automation Hero is designed to bring the benefits of AI to entire enterprises. 

An intelligent process automation platform that grows with you

Automation Hero’s versatility allows users to deploy it as a solution to fill in gaps created by their existing RPA, or replace everything as a complete, end-to-end intelligent automation solution. Truly designed to meet every user’s needs, the platform doesn’t require a heavy upfront investment of time or money. Pricing is entirely consumption based, so users only pay for the automations they actually use, as they use them. This allows organizations to stay nimble and see nearly immediate ROI. 

Thomson Reuters brought together leaders of the insurance sector to discuss how evolving insurance innovations are impacting the industry.

Jan 10, 2022 by Brodrick Lacy

Impact of intelligent automation on customer service

There’s normally a hesitancy when dealing with the implementation of automation software. Oftentimes businesses are concerned with how these automation innovations may impact customer experience. 

Thomson Reuters brought together several thought leaders from the insurance sector to discuss just how insurance innovations are realistically affecting the industry. Our founder and CEO, Stefan Groschupf joined them.

Below you can read some key quotes that we pulled from these leaders. Or, check out the recording for the full panel discussion.

5 takeaways for insurance automation

Stefan Groschupf (Founder & CEO, AutomationHero) – “Incredibly important, when introducing intelligent automation, it needs to be helpful.”  

Bill Martin (CEO,Plymouth Rock Assurance) – “If you’re starting with the customer, the only group that changes isn’t just IT… every other group needs to reformat what they do, to be able to deliver this to the customer.” 

Adam Fox (Head of Data, MassMutual) – “If we can operate more efficiently with a lower cost, then we can really pass that on in terms of dividends and other benefits back to our customers.”

Rachel Alt-Simmons (Head of Business Architecture and Design, AXA XL) – “We’ve taken a much more structured and managed approach. Our innovation initiative – one, identify topics that scale; two, make them actionable, and three, and meaningful to the businesses.”

Jan 10, 2022 by Automation Hero

Technology has taken accounts payable departments a long way since the days of the paper-driven office. In the past, processing invoices was a labor-intensive job, demanding hands-on attention from accountants who had to match purchase orders with payment requests, manually validate information, and send approval requests up the chain of command for further review. 

Now, the majority of AP professionals have discovered the benefits of invoice automation. In fact, a survey by the AP & P2P Network found that 70% of accounts payable departments have automated their invoice processing. Of the respondents, 25% have gone as far as to completely eliminate paper and other non-digital touchpoints.

Achieving Next Level Efficiency With IDP

Automation programs have removed a lot of the busy work that goes into invoice processing. For environments where paper invoices are still in circulation, programs can automate image capture to create digital copies, queue invoices for faster review, and automatically route documents to appropriate decision makers. These systems often merge purchase orders and invoice records together so there’s no need to do any matching or verification. 

What if there was a way to eliminate busy work?

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a technology that can replicate (or come close to imitating) the way humans understand information — and further add to the benefits of invoice automation, drastically improving labor efficiency. This frees AP professionals to focus on more important tasks, such as responding to vendor inquiries or further improving processes.

The biggest benefits are:

Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can transform any words and images from printed documents, PDFs, and other digital formats into machine-encoded text or data. Some more advanced systems can even read and convert handwriting. This virtually eliminates manual document processing because systems that use rules-based logic can automatically sort or label the captured data.

Reduced Human Error

The fewer human touch points there are in a process, the fewer opportunities for human error. Workers are most likely to make data entry errors when they’re busy — especially if they’re engaged in boring and repetitive work. IDP takes over a lot of the menial mental labor that AP professionals used to engage in, freeing them to spend their time more productively. Even better, IDP completes data capture tasks faster than a human ever could. 

Greater Scalability

When AP departments manually process invoices, more invoices automatically translates to greater need for labor. With IDP implemented, these systems can process a few hundred invoices almost as fast as they can a few dozen, with virtually no increased demand on workers. This allows companies to maintain productivity even during busy times for AP departments, without any disruptions or need for extra help. 

IDP Leaves Room for Improvement

For all the ways IDP improves productivity, it can be a struggle for AP departments to completely end manual processing. Much of this is due to legacy IDP systems’ dependency on templates to correctly label or contextualize the data it extracts from an invoice. If every invoice is formatted exactly the same, it will be easy for the program to understand who the payee is and how much they’re requesting. However, when formats vary, the IDP can misunderstand information and completely cancel out its benefits.

Editing current templates or creating more can require a lot of skilled labor and be quite expensive to set up. On the other hand, changing organizational processes to ensure every incoming invoice is formatted exactly the same can eat up even more resources. Plus, there will always be exceptions that require hands-on processing. 

The Next Generation of Invoice Process Automation

A new generation of IDP solutions are equipped with unprecedented machine learning capabilities to recognize and act on more data faster and with greater accuracy.  Automation Hero is powered by a deep learning AI and serves as a complete end-to-end solution. With a form-agnostic approach, the system can recognize any type of document and automatically contextualize data without the need to manually build a template, making it ideally suited for complex invoice management. With its self-serve and pay-as-you-go model, you can even scale the platform to handle other AP processes as needed. 

Learn more about how Automation Hero can streamline your invoice workflow in our new eBook.