Document Extraction,
Processing and
Comprehension

Recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the largest banks in the US on-boarded additional 500 consultants. The reason, they needed the extra manpower to manually assess and approve PPP (Paycheck protection program) related loan applications in a 10-day frame. An investment and effort that could have been easily avoided with the application of intelligent technologies such as Computer Vision, NLP, ML etc.

Analysts suggest that over 70% of organizations still have paper-based process dependenciesⁱ. Be it legal teams parsing contract pages, finance teams dealing with invoices, healthcare professionals dealing with patient data, clinical researchers sifting through R&D documentation, or procurement teams managing purchase orders, the burden of paper pushing is crippling business efficiency.

So, if these documents hold so much of value, what’s stopping businesses from using these insights?

The challenge of unlocking insights from unstructured documents

It is humanly impossible to extract, process and comprehend insights from unstructured documents due to the sheer volume of documentation that happens on a daily basis. Sifting through all this information manually would take time, reduce productivity, and increase the probability of inconsistencies. Manual efforts slow down the decision making and impact not only the time to market goods and services but also, hamper organizational productivity.

The logical approach is to digitize these documents and structure the unstructured data. This information can be critical in flagging off alerts or kicking of appropriate processes to achieve the desired outcome without manual intervention. However, that’s easier said than done. Document digitization technologies are faced with three key challenges:

The need for an end-to-end document extraction, processing and comprehension solution

For enterprises looking at unlocking business insights from their document, the above challenges leave several questions behind:

• How accurate is the information captured from the document?
• What happens if document is scanned upside down or the image quality is poor? Can the information be cleaned up?
• How will multiple types of documents with different templates in the same batch be processed?
• Will the technology be able to understand everything that is being said and done in a document – sentiments, intent, implied information etc.?
• Can the technology provide a summary of the information?
• How do we address cross-document conflicts and duplications?
• How do I consume the information unlocked from the document

Every business has unique document extraction, processing and comprehension needs that require suitable technology solutions. While building a solution in-house or leveraging open source technologies might sound doable, in our experience it’s not very efficient or cost effective. An end-to-end document extraction, processing and comprehension solution can take into account your specific business requirements and use cases based on type, volume, and multilingual nature of documents. An end-to-end solution can also offer proven ability in some of the critical success areas such as:

• Accuracy of document ingestion, clean up, and preparation
• Reliability of support for the languages that you operate in, and
• Domain ontologies specific to your business

What’s actually needed to solve this document conundrum is a combination of AI technologies that work together in tandem See Fig 1.

Fig 1: The building blocks of a document extraction, processing and comprehension solution

These would include:

Setting on the path to become an Insights driven enterprise

Extraction, processing, comprehension and consumption of information in documents is evolving. Enterprises are not looking at just digitization anymore and they are looking at insight driven consumption of that information. The need is for on-demand, contextual information that can transform business outcomes.

A one size fits all approach to document extraction, processing and comprehension does not apply in most enterprise scenarios. To successfully unlock business value from enterprise documents regardless of their complexity or domain specificity, a purpose-built document extraction, processing and comprehension platform like XtractEdge Platform is required.

With its advanced AI capabilities that use an ensemble of various Machine Learning and Deep Learning based techniques, flexible data management and analytics pipelines, XtractEdge Platform structures world’s complex multi-document data, makes it consumption ready to unlock the latent business value.

Simplifying unstructured complexity for business gains

In the aftermath of COVID-19, we will see accelerated digitization across the enterprise. Not leveraging insights contained in unstructured documents can impact your process efficiencies and put your business at a competitive disadvantage. Why waste 100’s of person-hours for work that can be done more accurately and efficiently by an AI engine? Why not give your employees a reprieve from repetitive manual tasks, and empower them for better decision making? Document extraction, processing and comprehension done right can help generate revenue opportunities, save costs, reduce compliance risks, improve operational efficiencies, and yield faster RoI. AI is integral to business success in the new normal, and the faster you adapt it, the farther you will be in business value creation.

References:

1. Webinar Recording: https://www.edgeverve.com/xtractedge/events/reimagine-enterprise-document-comprehension/
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/10/16/what-is-unstructured-data-and-why-is-it-so-important-to-businesses-an-easy-explanation-for-anyone/#363dde0915f6
3. https://www.visioncritical.com/blog/insight-driven-business-stats