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Artificial Intelligence is an interesting technology that is generally associated with science fiction. We all know from films like Terminator, I Robot and the Matrix what can happen when a computer starts to think for itself.

 Well the reality is that a computer or computer system can never think or learn as a human brain can. The scary thing is that the software it’s programmed with can.

In the Electronic Document Management (EDM) industry, however, artificial intelligence is here and in use in some of the very new solutions of today. These services are all aimed at reducing the time and costs associated with identifying, sorting and extracting data from previously static image scans.

Take for instance a worldwide engineering institution that buys products from around the world. These purchases result in invoices being submitted. The firm currently sends these 30,000 invoices per month to the purchase ledger department and has the exciting task of entering the details off all the invoices into the accounts software. The accounts software then verifies the entries against the purchase orders and processes the entries to the journal. The accounts department then keeps the invoices for the next seven years to remain legally compliant. The scene is a typical one with the ring binders taking up the shelves of space around the office.  

Now imagine the same company three months later after implementing an outsourced project to scan the invoices using the Intelligent Invoice Capture (IIC) system.

The invoices now land at a P.O. Box which uses the Royal Mail to deliver the documents every morning first thing. The envelopes are opened and the invoices are scanned using the latest Kodak scanning equipment. This then generates an image which is processed through the intelligent capture software. This is where the magic is done. Once processed the software provides a finished formatted file ready for uploading into your accounts software. The upload feeds all of the data into your accounts system which then does the normal checks against the purchase orders before posting the entries to the journal.

The saving are massive, no staff required to enter the data, no mistakes in input, no time delays, no documents to store in ring binders, and finally the invoices are held electronically for the next seven years.

Today we’re seeing significant new advances in capture technology that draw on rich scientific legacies. Research discoveries in statistical modelling, profile recognition and image processing have created a new generation of document capture systems that are able to:

Automatically clean degraded pages

Quickly find information stored on a page and detect its language for conversion into computer text 

Automate document recognition training, which eliminates the need for high-cost recognition training services and increases accuracy rates

For any organization that deals in large volumes of paper documents, these advances in OCR and ICR give today’s capture software the ability to identify and sort structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents and automatically process them without human intervention.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer science fiction, but reality and available in your workplace today. So why don’t you terminate those invoices and remove the robotic function of typing the data into your accounts software.

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