In today’s market, your digital transformation efforts play a crucial role in your business’s success. As technology continues to evolve rapidly, changing manual, paper-based processes to automated workflows have become necessary to compete with other businesses and stay relevant.
Intelligent capture is a technology that powers us through these changes, allowing us to identify and extract critical information without any explicit user guidance. However, intelligent capture is not limited to the extraction of information.
Combined with business process automation and content management, intelligent data capture gives us a strong foundation for automated workflow, helping us set up a workplace for the future.
This is why it’s important to consider the important features of intelligent capture to unleash its true potential. In this article, we will discuss how 4 ways we can use intelligent capture to leverage it strategically.
What Does Intelligent Capture Offer?
Intelligent capture is a combination of several highly completed and advanced technologies. Here are some of the main features intelligent capture can offer us:
Machine Learning
At the center of any capture solution lies technologies like OCR (Optical Character Recognition), as well as other machine learning algorithms. These algorithms apply artificial intelligence to software and enable us to train the system through samples.
The software can continually learn from production user input and enhance its ability to classify documents and improve data extraction over time. This helps us extract information more accurately without spending time, money, and energy maintaining rules.
Data Extraction
The main purpose of intelligent capture solutions is to provide support for data extraction. It helps us pull information from business processes regardless of language, document format, and the type of information (i.e., structured, semi-structured, and unstructured).
At the same time, intelligent capture extracts all kinds of fields, from bubbles, handprint, and machine print (any font) to cursive, barcodes, and checkboxes. This data extraction provides the fuel for automation.
However, gathering raw data through OCR isn’t enough. An intelligent capture solution needs to provide multiple OCR engine results and give features to format, locate, and interpret OCR data to make it actionable.
Validation Rules
Sometimes, data capture tools misidentify data during extraction. By setting validation rules, intelligent capture allows us to create an intuitive and keyboard-friendly data validation interface. Through such interfaces, we can quickly locate and resolve the extracted characters and fields.
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing is another specialized machine learning algorithm that helps us drive a better understanding of unstructured data. Using this tool, we can analyze content and sentiment in data from letters, emails, and contracts through text classification. Therefore, we can reduce human intervention and deliver relevant information to stakeholders.
Multichannel Capture
Customers, stakeholders, suppliers, and partners are never restricted to a single communication channel. This is why intelligent capture needs to provide multi-capture support to accommodate all preferences.
In other words, the technology must gather, classify, and deliver data from faxes, email, mobile, web, folder, desktop scanner, and MFP front-panel integration. At the same time, the Mobile SDK allows developers to integrate a range of different mobile capture features such as capture, extraction, classification, recognition, image compression, perfection, and data validation into apps and websites.
Distributed Capture
Just like the client-side, information management on the business end is not one-dimensional. Companies need a centralized back-office document capture where they can use distributed use cases and production scanners in branch offices, as well as on the field.
Intelligent capture backed by a content management system requires a central administration, reporting, scanner profile management, and licensing to minimize the total cost of ownership. If implemented correctly, it gives us an effective system to gather information from all corners of our business.
Mailroom Capture
Mailroom capture is an extension of intelligent capture where we can leverage intelligent capture across multiple departments. It allows us to deliver benefits of intelligent capture to sparse departments and provide support for the extraction and understanding of several document types such as medical documents, emails, letters, contracts, invoices, forms, shipping documents, onboarding documents, and mortgage documents.
4 Ways to Leverage Intelligent Capture Strategically
The following are some of the main ways intelligent capture helps businesses meet organizational goals and optimize knowledge management.
1-Streamlining AP Operations
Accounts Payable is an exceptional challenge for companies across different industries. When a business grows, the volume of AP documents increases exponentially. This is especially worrisome for businesses with several branches and departments.
Advanced intelligent capture solutions enhance throughput and reliability and allow companies to establish a standardized global protocol and streamline accounts payable operations.
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2-Scaling Processes and Facilitating Growth
As businesses grow, internal inefficiencies become more apparent. Problems within individual processes combined with inter-dependency among departments slow down the entire workflow. Hiring additional staff doesn’t solve the problem and costs continue to increase.
This is where we need solutions like Intelligent Capture. Intelligent capture is at the center of your organization’s business processes and plays a crucial role in facilitating growth. It helps us manage the growing volume of information and ease the pressure on our staff.
Additionally, as intelligent capture is available on the cloud, we can pay only for what we need and adjust our priorities as the situation becomes more demanding.
3-Creating an Environment for Automation
Although many companies use intelligent capture exclusively for AP processing, it has applications in several other places. In enterprises, there are several departments where the company has to process volumes of documents.
By introducing intelligent capture to your workflow, you can optimize how information flows through human touch-points and direct it to where it is needed. Therefore, there is no need for manual intervention, and you can set up a seamless ecosystem of processes.
4-Enhancing Analysis and Reporting
Another important use case for intelligent capture is in analysis and reporting. Intelligent capture allows us to monitor system performance and gain in-depth insight into processes. By tapping into information in internal business processes, you can a deeper understanding of processes.
Advanced solutions can show you operator statistics, extraction accuracy, batch status, as well as other reporting and analytics features for effective document management.
Data is fast becoming a strategic asset, and leveraging it effectively is the key to growth and success. Intelligent capturehelps us capture data from disparate sources and delivers us timely insights.
By incorporating it into our workflow, we can make the most of our resources and create an efficient, productive, and high-yield system.
