Accelerate Your Digital Transformation with Intelligent Document Processing
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Accelerate your Digital Transformation with Intelligent Document Processing 1 ACCELERATE YOUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH INTELLIGENT DOCUMENT PROCESSING Not seen the return on your digital transformation efforts? Or struggling to get digital transformation projects off the ground? This eBook offers practical and pragmatic advice on how Sypht’s simple, smart and scalable intelligent document processing can help super-charge your digital transformation journey. 2 Contents 1. Introduction ..................................................................4 2. How Sypht can help .................................................8 3. The journey ...................................................................11 4. Sypht in action .......................................................... 14 5. Future-proofing your business ......................... 17 6. Summary ..................................................................... 19 3 1. Introduction How we interpret data can sometimes be a matter of life or death. As World War II unfolded, the US Air Force had a problem. American planes needed armour to protect them in combat, but too much weighed the planes down, making them less maneuverable. Fortunately, the Air Force had the data to solve the problem. The planes that returned from combat were riddled with bullet holes – and the damage was far from uniform. If they simply concentrated the armour around the areas where the planes were being hit, it would make them safer and lighter. But how much more armour should they use – and where? Section of plane Bullet holes per square foot Engine 1.11 Fuselage 1.73 Fuel system 1.55 Rest of plane 1.8 For that, they turned to Columbia University’s Statistical Research Group, which provided a surprising answer. The armour doesn’t go where the bullet holes are, it goes where they aren’t: the engines. The reason? Planes that were hit in the engines weren’t coming back to base at all[1]. Columbia’s recommendation was implemented and ultimately saved many lives. Data provides the foundation for effective decision making, but without the full picture, it can also mislead. Unfortunately for today’s leaders, the data they actually use represents just a small share of the treasure trove of information stored with their organisations. [1] The story is told in ‘How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life’ by Jordan Ellenberg. 4 Penguin (2015). The growing mountain of unstructured data About 80% of all data is typically unstructured, locked in paper documents, PDFs, emails, or formats like audio, images and video. This type of information rarely has the consistent fields that traditional IT systems or optical character recognition (OCR) software need to function effectively. Businesses are using manual data entry to reformat data from these different sources to fit the formats required by their downstream information systems. Generating and storing all that data costs time and money. But the cost of not being able to use it is even higher. The situation is only getting worse. “By 2025, data will be growing at a rate equivalent to a new Google every four days – and 80% of that data is unstructured for enterprises,” Sypht chief executive Warren Billington says. “We see that as being a real challenge for organisations today in terms of being able to capture, access, use, and connect that data and those insights into their business systems and processes.” How much of your organisation’s unstructured data is kept in original format (documents, emails etc) and never digitaly extracted for use in multiple information systems? % of Participants 30% 20% 10% 0% 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% Not sure Participants’ answers on % of data never digitaly extracted Source: IDM survey “ANZ Digital Transformation” of 112 Australian participants across 25 industries 5 conducted in May 2020. Why digital transformation has become a “must”, not a “maybe” Digital Transformation has been a board-level topic and business priority for some time. Enterprise and mid-market businesses have been investing in Digital, AI, and Automation to drive revenue, reduce costs, create a differentiated customer experience, and fundamentally transform the way they do business. All of these investments fundamentally rely on actionable data to achieve their premise of value. While for many this evolution is underway, customers are seeing varying levels of success and benefits to the bottom line. Many businesses are undergoing digital transformation journeys in an effort to digitise data and information, automate processes, learn from better analytics, and bolster digital communications. But the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has created new business forces. It has prompted businesses to rethink the future of work: automation may play a greater role as more people are working remotely. Just as importantly, a sharp economic downturn means they must quickly demonstrate ROI from any initiative. This new landscape requires a smart and scalable way to deliver value quickly, which goes against the grain of large-scale multi-year digital transformation programs. Traditional digital solutions tend to be costly, high-touch, and time consuming to both deploy and maintain. In a post-COVID world, this approach can no longer be justified, as the risks are simply too high. A recent IDM survey found AI-based automatic classification was cited as the most-wanted aspect of digital transformation by 55% of respondents yet only 22% said it was being delivered. Meanwhile, when it came to content/text analysis capabilities, 43% of respondents said they wanted it, but only 29% said it was being delivered. 6 Many organisations have been let down by OCR systems that struggle with different document fields and interpreting natural language. These legacy solutions have become embedded into their workflows but they desperately need better solutions. Smarter solutions can interpret the natural language which traditional OCR or legacy systems are not capable of, providing a new foundation that can help organisations move beyond simple data extraction to value extraction. Growing volumes of unstructured data Many organisations still struggle to effectively & efficiently capture valuable information trapped in growing volumes of unstructured data 175tn 80% Gigabytes of data will be of data created by 2025 created by 2025, growing at will be unstructured. Most a rate equivalent to a “new of this will be in the form Google“ every 4 days. of documents & images. $5tn <10% Economic value potential in US of companies are scalling from “liquid“ data, improving intelligent automation, while progress efficiency, and creating only 0.5% of all data collected new services & value. by companies is being used to extract insights & unlock value. 7 2. How Sypht can help The problem of unstructured data is complex, but the solution doesn’t have to be. Advances in technology mean artificial intelligence can power a new way to unlock hidden information. The potential rewards are huge. An intelligent document processing solution can help enterprises lower costs, reduce error rates, increase employee capacity and elevate customer experience. COST SAVINGS Fast, accurate data extraction MORE REVENUE means they can stop spending significant amounts of money Automated data extraction can manually processing data, underpin more efficient processing correcting data errors, or of bills, invoices or infringement supporting legacy technology. notices, speeding up payments. ELEVATE CUSTOMER BETTER EXPERIENCE COMPLIANCE Quick, automated eligibility Unstructured data requires time- assessments for products such consuming manual assessment as loans based on customer or only a sample of documents documents can lead to higher being checked, whereas automated sales, increased retention and intelligent systems can monitor better engagement. compliance across every document. While these solutions take place at multiple points along a data value chain, advances in technology make implementation simple. Long-term, strategic consulting-led transformation projects are a thing of the past. 8 Simple: Software as a Service capability Delivering software as a service (SaaS) Sypht has combined the best of both has many benefits. Organisations can worlds with its Artificial Intelligence-as-a- safely let it run behind the scenes, with the Service (AIaaS) platform. knowledge that the software will always be kept up to date by the software provider. It has an intuitive user interface and can be It can be turned on or off as required, and used off the shelf, just like a SaaS product. can scale with a growing business on- Sypht’s out-of-the-box intelligent document demand. processing service delivers accuracy of more than 90%. However, operationalising artificial intelligence (AI) within a business is often But businesses can also tailor Sypht’s AI to a much more complex matter. It typically deliver even more value. They build specific requires a high level of specialised skill rules or add their own capability on top of sets and business support because it our platform. It’s all there for you to use at changes business processes, which involves your own pace. supervision and training. Smart: Immediate high accuracy that improves over time Sypht’s intelligent document processing This accuracy is not constrained by one requires no coding and delivers initial type of document created by similar accuracy of more than 90%. But that’s only organisations. Sypht’s AI can interpret the beginning. multiple documents, even