Almost every customer and prospect we talk with has solved a few use cases with robotic process automation (RPA) or a similar technology and now wants more. They’ve had a taste of the benefits and now want to scale automation enterprise-wide.
In this post, we’ll share a few secrets for getting there, including one big one: you’re going to need an intelligent automation platform, not just RPA.
Beyond point solutions
Lots of companies start their automation journey with a point solution that addresses a single use case. Maybe it’s an RPA tool or one that uses templates and optical character recognition (OCR) to address a specific use case that involves highly structured content, such as processing contracts or tax forms.
That’s all well and good but if you want to extend automation across the enterprise, you need a tool that’s use case-agnostic. A sound intelligent document processing tool can handle any kind of content, and thus can be applied to any enterprise use case.
Support for structured and unstructured content
Plenty of RPA and templated solutions can handle structured content, where you can count on data being in the same place each time from one document to the next. Things get more complicated when it comes to unstructured content such as Word documents, emails, images and PDFs, where the data you’re after may be located anywhere. (See this post for a primer on structured vs. unstructured and semi-structured content.)
For unstructured content, you need an intelligent document processing platform. The “intelligent” part means it takes advantage of artificial intelligence technologies such as deep learning, machine learning and transfer learning that enable it to “read” documents much like a human does.
A good intelligent automation platform will be trained on a large set of labeled data, enough such that it can discern the context behind any kind of content, structured or unstructured. It’s then a relatively straightforward matter to train the tool on any use case you want, from automating insurance claim processing to mortgage underwriting and anti-money laundering. (By the way, at this point you no longer need those point solutions; the intelligent automation tool will be able to handle those jobs, too.)
Simplicity drives adoption
Finally, to drive adoption across the enterprise, your intelligent automation tool has to be simple to use. Ideally, it should be simple enough such that business people can use it, turning them into what’s known as citizen developers.
Think about that concept for a minute. If you want to automate any given process, who better to lead the automation effort than the business people who understand the process best? With no need to involve IT or data scientists, there’s nothing lost in translation between the business process experts and the technology team.
The key to empowering citizen data scientists is giving them an intelligent automation tool that’s truly easy for them to use.
That’s why Indico has put so much effort into ensuring the user interface to our Intelligent Process Automation platform is simple and intuitive. In a matter of hours, business process owners can label about 200 of the actual documents involved in a process and have a working model that’s up to 95% accurate.
Under the covers, there’s a lot of AI technology helping to make that happen, but it’s well-hidden from users. All they know is they can create automation models that deliver benefits like an 85% reduction in process cycle times and a 4x increase in process capacity – for any use case involving documents of any type, structured or unstructured.
Skeptical? Get in touch to set up a free demo and we’ll show you exactly how it works, or feel free to contact us with any questions. Indico can and will help you extend your document process automation efforts enterprise-wide.
