How to conduct intelligent document and data management

The opinions expressed by entrepreneurs contributors are their own.

Data is the lifeblood of any organization. When it flows freely, businesses can grow, win new customers and prepare for the future. When it is limited, stagnation sets in. Time and money are wasted, and emerging opportunities are missed.

For too many businesses, critical data is locked on a printed page, stored in a box, or on the desk of someone out of the office. It's hard to move this information around without dozens of people re-entering it into an electronic format so it can be more easily shared, analyzed, processed, and processed.

These outdated practices drive the adoption of intelligent document management.

Why traditional document management fails

Document management has been around for a while. It usually involves scanning all the pieces of paper in an office to understand what a business has so they can decide what to keep and developing an indexing system that allows other employees to retrieve information.

Previously, companies manually indexed documents, which meant a human looked at a sheet of paper, zeroed in on the vendor name and account number, and entered them into a database. Advances then used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to aid in indexing. This is when the software tries to figure out what each character is, for example, a machine reading six digits in an invoice and coming up with the number 123456. The problem is that a "6" also looks like a "b", so OCR is not very accurate.

Traditional document management has significant shortcomings: information is only useful when it is inserted into workflows. That's where intelligent document management comes in, and it's essential to digital transformation.

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A shift towards information management

Intelligent document management is more than a better way to scan documents, as it enables information management. With its "intelligence", Intelligent Document Management offers automated classification, routing, measurement, monitoring and multi-channel information management powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Automatic classification means scanners deploy AI to make intelligent decisions about the content of a page (e.g. recognize a bill of lading versus an invoice) and categorize it.

Then, following internal company workflows, it routes the electronic version of the document to the right person based on a combination of roles and rules (e.g. Mary, the controller, must approve all invoices over $10,000, while invoices under $5,000 go to Fred). Approvals can occur simultaneously or follow a strict sequential order.

Monitoring is essential. What if Mary is on vacation for two weeks and this bill needs to be paid? A smart document management tool has timers, recognizing when a deadline is approaching and notifying and redirecting the document to a designated person so it can be processed. It also monitors the entire process and reports to management.

Finally, intelligent document management supports multi-channel information, whether it's a piece of paper from a supplier or a bill of lading generated from an order management system. AI ensures that data is collected correctly and routed through the correct workflows.

With intelligent document management, approximately 90% of a document's processing is handled by computer, reducing administrative time, eliminating human error and saving money.

Start with intelligence...