What is Automation ?
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions — and embodying those predeterminations in machines
While strategy heads and digital officers have amassed enormous amount of information on trends in Automation, one key question that we face while working with clients is on understanding document.
Document understanding
Document Understanding (DU) is one of the fastest-growing areas in business process automation. The DU ecosystem includes technologies that can interpret and extract text and meaning from a wide range of document types including structured, semi-structured and unstructured — even ones that contain handwriting, tables and checkboxes
Multiple technologies can unlock the power of document understanding such as:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Many of the best-known OCR engines on the market are already integrated with UiPath. These include ABBYY, Tesseract (an open-source OCR provided by Google), Kofax OmniPage, Microsoft OCR, and Google OCR. In addition, UiPath Document OCR has recently been released as another great choice for customers.
- Template bases Extractors (TBEs)
- Supervised-learning-based machine learning extractors (SMLEs)
- Natural language processing (NLP)
In today’s business processes, most of the routine and mundane tasks employees perform consist of creating, reading, reviewing, and transcribing paperwork (documents). Employees spend a significant percentage of their work time reading these docs, extracting data, and passing on the much-needed information into other downstream applications manually. Since the data extraction from the documents and input to other apps is done by a human, the process is subject to problems of accuracy and reliability.
UiPath’s Document Understanding solution allows us to intelligently process data with a high level of accuracy and reliability for any type of document such as invoice, receipt, financial statement, utility bill, and any other kind of text that has a different structure. The general flow for UiPath’s DU process is encapsulated into the 6 process steps below.
What are the advantages of Document Understanding?
Document understanding provides the means to store, index, query and analyse entire categories of documents where these operations were previously impossible (or at least hugely expensive and impractical).
AI document analysis can produce several benefits, including:
- Reduction in errors.
- Better compliance.
- Free resources from manual and repetitive document processing tasks.
- Perform analysis and gain insight into your data.
- Integrate previously underutilized information within your system into other business apps and processes where it can do the best.
- Integrate with your Current Cloud Service provider’s services for cloud document processing.
How does Document Understanding work?
Document understanding AI encompasses a range of techniques, but the fundamental steps are the same. Here is a look at those steps in practice:
- Taxonomy – Defines the files and data for extraction.
- Digitization – Provides text and its location for the technical solution.
- Classification – Identifies and classifies the documents from a specified list.
- Extraction – Extracts the data from the document.
- Validation – If needed, a human will help confirm the extracted data by a human using Machine Learning.
- Export – Exports the extracted information for further usage.
Conclusion
Ultimately, information or data is very often the most valuable resource that a business can have at its disposal but is only as productive as its ability to process, understand, and get insight and value out of it. To that end, document understanding is a powerful tool to unlock more of the value contained in your documents.
some of the most exciting players in the intelligent document processing market, are ABBYY, UiPath, and AppZen and experts are finding the best and most cost-effective document understanding solutions to meet the business requirements of any organization
