Automated Document Processing: How to Do Away with Manual Paperwork?

Drowning in paperwork? Whether it’s insurance, finance, healthcare, or manufacturing, documents rule all industries, from insurance claims and loan statements to patient signoffs. To deal with them, organizations enter digitization. According to Forrester, 65% deem integrating document digitization with daily apps crucial to keep their work flowing.

Automated document processing is a shortcut to ditching paperwork chaos and replacing it with document management efficiency, unleashing tech to manage, organize, and revolutionize documents effortlessly. To help you revolutionize document management, we are breaking down what it is, the tech behind it, and the game-changing benefits. Let’s dive in!

Let’s start by explaining what document automated processing & understanding means. In essence, automated document processing is just what it sounds like—a set of technologies used together to streamline the handling and conversion of unstructured documents into structured formats. Each tool automates extracting, interpreting, or manipulating information from digital or scanned paper documents, images, PDFs, emails, or other documents.

Through AI and automation techniques, automated document processing systems can recognize and categorize data, extract relevant information, and perform predefined document-based tasks, eliminating manual effort.

Intelligent document processing is an essential component of automated document processing. Both concepts are closely related and usually used together, due to which (and similarity in naming) they are often confused. Still, they aren’t the same.

Automated document processing focuses on automating rule-based document processing tasks using technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and software automation. These tasks include data extraction or sorting.

While automated document processing can be efficient for specific tasks, it might require additional manual adjustments when applied independently to process unstructured documents or changes in document formats.

Intelligent document processing goes beyond basic automation by leveraging AI technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to enable systems to interpret, categorize, and validate the extracted data. Doing so enables intelligent document processing to adapt to variations and better handle unstructured documents.

Since automated document processing and intelligent document processing complement one another, automated document processing vendors often use these terms interchangeably.

Automated Document Processing (ADP) involves using technology to streamline routine document-related tasks, typically relying on rule-based systems. It focuses on efficiently processing information in documents; hence, its main applications include automating data entry and improving document classification.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) employs advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate tasks and understand and interpret unstructured data. It goes beyond automated document processing, offering a more nuanced understanding of content, and making it especially adept at handling diverse and complex documents in finance, healthcare, and legal industries.

To properly extract, interpret, and classify documents, automated document processing makes use of several technologies: