By Darren Bak, Synthesis Head of Intelligent Data
The year 2020, according to AWS chief Andrew Jassy, was a wake-up call for cloud adoption and digital transformation. He advised that businesses that delay digital transformation or that hold on to legacy technologies and processes face disruption or irrelevance. The hard truth he proposed was: transform or face an eventual decline.
But not all processes are made equal. Some are harder to transform than others. Physical documents, for example, remain an ever-present thorn in many a business’s side. Many business processes still rely on paper-based workflows and these businesses are falling behind in customer experience, not to mention document processing time.
Customer onboarding, “Know Your Customer” (KYC) and insurance claims are just some examples of workflows that require forms to be completed or certified copies of identification to be provided. Many documents, in particular relating to the life insurance and legal sectors, need to be completed by hand and digital signatures are not currently accepted. Certified copies of supporting documents will remain as physical documents for a very long time to come.
But how can a business overcome the challenge of physical documents, paper-based and email-based processes with unstructured data?
At Synthesis, we have found that a combination of email routing and document understanding will significantly solve this challenge of managing large amounts of physical documents, tapping into the opportunity offered by unstructured data to increase operational efficiency, improve customer experience and inform decision-making.
Imagine a world where physical documents are processed in real time through automation and machine learning, with:
- an understanding of what the document is;
- an understanding of its content that is immediately searchable; and
- an understanding of its entities which are linked across documents, processes and divisions.
This goes beyond mere automation. It unlocks rich insights from the documents as client requests are processed. Employees are saved time that can better be used elsewhere.
The document understanding solution brings Intelligent OCR coupled with natural language processing, machine reading comprehension and document / entity recognition.
The magic is not only the real-time extraction of data from your documents, but a way to visualise how data in different documents is connected and interacts with each other.
Synthesis and AWS are hosting a webinar on 15 February to demonstrate how businesses can tap into this technology, AWS Webinar (awscloud.com). We will showcase how the intelligent document solution linked data across two separate divisions of an enterprise and its data siloes, allowing the enterprise to assess and manage risk before criminals could take advantage and commit fraud.
We will also showcase how Nedbank Insurance and Synthesis used machine learning and design thinking to solve the complex challenge of email routing. A robot now does this 24/7 to ensure clients get a quick response, up to 11 times faster, to respond to emails with five attachments.
That is just the start…
Synthesis is providing a limited number of free sessions to showcase how quickly they can process your documents and provide actionable insights.