From RPA to IA: 3 benefits to your business when you add IDP

You have a business and its growing. You understand the value of automation and you’re fully on board with it. Gartner considers RPA (Robotic Process Automation) the fastest growing software category, predicting that it will grow 57% in 2019 alone. Of the companies who haven’t adopted RPA yet, 84% will start implementing it fully or partially over the next three years.

You, on the other hand, are already there. You’re ahead of the game.

But something doesn’t quite add up. Your employees now have more tools to help them do their job but they also spend more time manipulating those tools. 

That great idea that one of your team members brought up at the last company meeting? You know it would take your business one level up but you also know it’s impossible to implement because of time constraints and resource allocation. Despite all the progress, employees are still heads down dealing with tasks that require intense manual work for complex processes – things like data extraction and data normalization – turning unstructured content, such as text and images, into the structured format needed for downstream tasks.

What most people don’t realize is that RPA technology, while extremely useful, is over a decade old. It was designed to mimic activities carried out by humans, but what we really need today is technology that mimics human intelligence.

Luckily such technology already exists. IA (Intelligent Automation) is a set of new technologies that fall under the umbrella of AI. It combines RPA with machine learning and fundamental process redesign through next-gen automation technologies like intelligent document processing (IDP), meaning it can learn and improve over time.

Intelligent Automation should be implemented in advanced automations where moving from rules-based to an experiences-based (AI) decision making will make a huge difference.

What role does intelligent document processing (IDP) play?

Intelligent document processing (IDP) has emerged as a critical 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) and natural language processing (NLP) to effectively handle and oversee document-centric business processes. Through the adoption of IDP, enterprises can optimize business processes that involve 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 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)

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.

Don’t Spend More on Ripping and Replacing

If you’ve already implemented RPA you might be nervous that in order to get the benefits of AI, you have to rip and replace whatever system you currently have in place. But is it worth the time and money? Probably not. That’s why we’ve designed Hero_Flow in such a way that it easily integrates with whatever system you currently have in place and leaves the door open for any other technology that you might use in the future. Our platform has more than 50 connectors and a plug-in API that can easily connect with even the most complex IT systems. 

You will also get the flexibility to customize the system. While traditional RPA vendors have good data source libraries, you have no control over what the connector actually does and cannot customize it. Hero_Flow has a JDBC connector that allows you to directly define what the connector does and to do it at your own pace (you don’t have to wait for us to design it for you).

Built-in AI Eliminates Potential Security Issues

Traditional RPA adds in AI through partnerships or third-party add-ons. Are you concerned about introducing a third party system and the security risk that comes with it?  So are we. That’s why with Hero_Flow, the AI is built in, minimizing the risk of any security issues or information loss.

With AI native to the platform, you can upload pre-existing AI models or build your own deep learning AI models within the point-and-click environment of AI Studio and use those. After you have an AI model for your automation, the model is trained by your data to improve accuracy over time.

Up and Running in No Time on the Cloud

Worried that a new system will use precious computer power which will slow things down even further? Traditional RPA runs locally on your machine for attended automations (and within an organization’s network on-premise for unattended automations). That means that traditional RPA vendors would have to retrofit their platforms to run on the cloud. And with retrofitting comes inevitable technology tradeoffs.

Hero_Flow was built to run natively on the cloud (but can also support running on-premise, without any tradeoffs). Having the platform run on the cloud means you can use your computer power for more powerful and creative tasks.

The other benefit of being native to the cloud is that the set up takes no time at all. You can get up and running very quickly.

So now that there is technology advanced enough to take over complex automation tasks requiring human intelligence, are you ready to free up the humans on your team to do more interesting work? You’ll be surprised what they come up with. 

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.

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