Digital Document Management and Automation for the Intelligent Enterprise

No one wants to be called a ‘paper-pusher’ these days. The connotation of the term has become that of negativity and waste, but the function of the paper-pusher role hasn’t gone away as organizations strive to go digital. In most cases, the processing of the digital document still requires the ‘paper-pusher’ role whether that includes routing, mark-ups, revisions, approvals, indexing, or filing.

Removing the paper has had the effect of increasing the document management problem. Piles of paper have become terabytes of files. Organizations are having to deal with multiple ingestion points, file types and repositories. Beyond basic capture to get paper into a digital format, the true realization of value occurs when the documents are digitally accessible, shareable, and searchable.

Automating the Paper-Pusher

Assessments of current transactional and operational processes typically reveal a status quo of manual classifying within the organizations. A national automotive maintenance and services company centrally processing 20 banker boxes a month with an average of 5,000 bills of lading and related store location documents required twenty individuals to complete the document ingestion and indexing.

Applying optimizations enabled the automation of the data extraction process to find, extract and classify key information from complex and variable documents based on data extraction rules to recognize pattern types of words and other document identification options. To validate and improve the auto-classification accuracy, rules where implemented to verify the extracted data against the master database system and to verify the information against simple to complex business conditional rules to identify data issues.

The results of implementing intelligent capture for the national automotive services company were dramatic. With the capture processes automated and data extraction rules working, one indexer now handles the same monthly volume of documents that previously required twenty individuals.

Learn more on this topic from the TerraLink breakout presentation "It’s not about Paper" from the 2019 Toronto OpenText Enterprise World conference.