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Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)

How to extract unstructured data from documents

Using IPA for Document Intake & Understanding

INDICO RESOURCE

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Automating processes which incorporate unstructured data – documents, forms, text, images, video and more.

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Download the eBook: The Unstructured Data Imperative. Why Enterprises need to act now.

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Intelligent Process Automation: Key Benefits

Empower process owners

Intuitive interface enables process owners to build their own automation models; no data scientists required. Automate workflows involving unstructured data to dramatically reduce processing time with unmatched accuracy.

Unlock your unstructured data

Automate the process of converting unstructured data to a structured format suitable for analytics engines – gain new, actionable insights.

Freedom from templates & rules

Award-winning AI intelligent automation technology can “read” unstructured documents – so your employees don’t have to. Build models with just 200 sample documents – no rules or templates required.

Bringing value to all business stakeholders

Line of business executive

  • Bring artificial intelligence to bear on practical business problems – with no AI expertise required
  • Increase profitability by improving business efficiency, including for processes involving large teams
  • Enable subject matter experts to focus on higher value tasks

AI & IA professionals

  • Explainable AI – understand why and how your AI makes its decisions
  • No expensive compute power needed – deploys on a single GPU

Process Professionals

  • Enable automated, scalable human-like decisioning
  • Improve process accuracy and eliminate risk by removing potential for human error
  • Streamline workflows to drive process efficiency and lower the cost of operations

What is Intelligent Process Automation?

Enabling your business to automate processes involving unstructured data

Many firms have reached the limit to what RPA can do for them. They’re now asking: What can Intelligent Process Automation do for me?

Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) empowers businesses to implement unstructured data process automation, including for text, images and more. IPA does so without requiring rule-based decision-making, or huge training data sets, that are out of reach for 95% of enterprises.

Indico’s approach to IPA builds on the artificial intelligence concept of transfer learning, where a model trained on one task is used for another, related task.

Transfer learning addresses one of the key challenges in any AI-based automation solution: the time required to learn exceptions. A process automation solution used to have to understand thousands of use cases before it could be used in production to automate an actual process. Transfer learning has changed that equation.

Indico has created a base model consisting of more than 500 million labeled data points, enough for the model to understand human language and context. Applying transfer learning allows users to then create custom models for downstream tasks using a fraction of the data normally required – 100 to 1000x less as compared to traditional approaches.

Rather than training the model on hundreds of thousands of examples, or creating rules to account for every variation of the documents at hand, Indico’s intelligent process automation tools let you start with its base model and train on just 200 or so examples of the process you want to automate. In just an hour or so, you’ll have a complete workflow automation model.

Also, because most of the training is already done up front, the unstructured data process automation platform can run on just one or two GPUs, and scale up using low-cost CPU. Overall, you get a highly effective intelligent automation tool that can pay for itself in short order by dramatically reducing both process cycle times and the human resources required to perform the process.

That’s the benefit of Indico’s intelligent process automation tool; it doesn’t require a million-dollar investment to run.

Intelligent Process Automation offers a single solution for document process automation: intake, understanding and digitization: in other words, unstructured document processing, as well as processing of structured and semi-structured documents. This allows for the end-to-end document process automation of contract analysis, customer onboarding, commercial underwriting, financial document analysis, mortgage processing, billing form reviews, insurance claims analysis and much more. With its cognitive intelligence capabilities, IPA can understand the text, images, documents and other unstructured data that are fundamental to so many business processes – and make accurate judgments based on surrounding context.

Unstructured data creates problems for rule-based automation engines, including robotic process automation platforms, and OCR templating approaches, because it’s so difficult to define rules that apply to something you can’t predict. And unstructured data is nothing if not unpredictable.

By definition, unstructured data refers to data that is variable in nature. It could be in the form of a contract, Word documents, text (including emails) and images.

IPA also enables companies to analyze unstructured data. Because business intelligence and analytics tools can generally only deal with structured data, the value inherent in unstructured data remains untapped. Indico Data changes that by automating the process of turning unstructured data into a structured format, such as JSON or .csv. Once it’s structured, you can feed the data to analytics engines and business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Power BI and Google’s Looker.

Along the same lines, Indico’s IPA can prepare unstructured data for input into data visualization tools such as Tableau, which also requires data to be in a structured format. Effectively, Indico Data makes possible unstructured data analytics and visualization.

This is a sea change for companies that have been relying on rule-based automation engines, including robotic process automation platforms and OCR templating approaches. These tools cannot effectively process unstructured data because it’s simply too difficult to create rules for data that has no predetermined format.

With IPA, you can now automate processes involving unstructured data, unlocking value feeding it to BI and other analytics tools. Literally decades-worth of business intelligence is now newly at your disposal.

Indico customer story: F50 Insurance company achieves 300% return on investment with Indico’s Intelligent Process Automation

This Fortune 50 organization is an innovator and leader in protection planning and retirement and savings solutions worldwide. Its subsidiaries offer life, accident, health insurance, retirement, and savings products through agents, third-party distributors such as banks and brokers, and direct marketing channels. The company serves more than 90 of the top 100 FORTUNE 500® companies in the United States.

The company began its automation journey to digitize valuable content accumulated over decades – millions of pages of unstructured content – long-form content, policy contracts, claims submissions, emails, and more. Starting with RPA, they digitized structured data – but quickly hit a roadblock. “While we had captured major efficiencies with our RPA programs, we were seeing a graveyard of use cases involving unstructured data that we couldn’t touch,” the VP of Strategy and Planning told us.

Solution

The company began using Indico’s platform, allowing the reading and understanding of unstructured content. The insurance firm appreciated that employees could use the platform to build models with a point-and-click, low-code application interface. As a result, the Center of Excellence team could focus on finding automation opportunities.

Results

The team initially identified 134,000 documents containing valuable information for risk modeling. Based on a training set of 200 samples, the model classified all the attributes needed – in just a few days. The company saved 5,400 hours with the Indico platform and expects to save $100 million over the next few years.

As the VP of Strategy and Planning put it: “Our CoE is in the business of scaling – it’s not enough for us to have a point solution to a single or small number of use cases…we want to continue expanding our automation scope. To that end, we need a solution that covers the broadest number of problems in the organization.”

For the full Indico IPA customer story, click here.


Built for business people to address business issues

The process through which companies use Intelligent Process Automation to build data models is simple and highly effective. Business subject matter experts label the data points they deem most important to the process they’re looking to automate. As they apply labels, the model is updated on the fly and will start to show predictions on subsequent datasets. Once you’re comfortable with the predicted results, you’re done building your model.

The beauty of this approach is that the people who understand the business problem and the desired results – those on the business side of the house – are the ones who train the model. With Indico, there’s no need to try to explain to a data scientist what you’re after and then hope you get the appropriate results. Line-of-business creates its own models easily.

And it’s not a complex process. Everything is in plain English and you can have a fully working model in an hour. Intelligent Process Automation is just that simple.


Not your Typical AI

If that sounds different from other AI process automation solutions you’ve encountered, that’s because it is. While Indico’s Intelligent Process Automation solution is certainly sophisticated in its use of cognitive technologies, including machine learning and natural language processing, we keep the technology behind the scenes, enabling an army of citizen data scientists to use the technology to solve real business problems.

Natural language processing (NLP), for example, is core to our intelligent process platform. It’s what enables our generalized model to understand the context around unstructured data, just as a human would. But it’s built into our models and functions behind the scenes; there’s no need for those who use the platform to even know what NLP is.

The same goes for machine learning (ML). While our engineering team built our IPA platform using cutting edge ML models, they all sit in the background – there’s no need for users to tweak or otherwise interact with them, or even understand how they work. Instead, you can just think about how to apply IPA to take repetition and complexity out of your processes and deliver real business benefits.

Intelligent Process Automation
Use Cases:

Claims Analysis

IPA can be used to automate the classification and annotation of a new claim, and route it to the appropriate SME for evaluation and processing. The result is faster turnaround time and improved accuracy in claims processing, which drives improved customer satisfaction and organizational efficiency.

Loss Run Analysis

One of the thorniest parts of the commercial insurance underwriting process is getting an accurate picture of the applicant’s loss history, generally gleaned from loss run reports . But it can be a cumbersome process to collect all the reports and accurately extract data from them for input into the underwriting system – making it an excellent candidate for intelligent process automation in insurance .

 

Medical Claims

Few vertical industries are as document-intensive as healthcare, whether on the provider or insurance side. That makes the healthcare industry ripe for automated insurance claims processing and other chores, for both providers and insurers alike. Intelligent process automation can help healthcare organizations address unstructured documents, driving cost savings and improving the patient experience.

Enrollment Processes

Getting new clients is a good thing, but for insurance companies it also creates a challenge: processing all the required documents. To date, it’s been a largely manual process that for large insurers can easily involve 15 million documents per year, making it a ripe target for intelligent document processing technology

Commercial underwriting

Major commercial underwriting processes often involve thousands of pages of documentation. Insurance workflow automation can dramatically improve the process by creating underwriting criteria that IPA solutions automatically recognize, enabling them to quickly come up with a “score” for each potential customer. The result is a major reduction in response times to customers as well as improved accuracy, satisfaction, organizational efficiency and profit.

Customer onboarding

IPA can be used to automatically classify and extract relevant unstructured data from customer onboarding documents into the bank’s digital management system. This results in improved accuracy and speed for onboarding a new customer, driving improved customer satisfaction and faster time to revenue for the bank.

LIBOR Remediation

In 2017 a UK-based regulatory group announced the LIBOR interest rate benchmark would be phased. As a result, banks and financial institutions around the globe are scrambling to determine their exposure – a task that’s tailor-made for intelligent process automation solutions.

Loan underwriting

Banks with detailed processes for appraising and approving mortgages, including data extraction and image recognition, can use intelligent automation tools to process the extraction of relevant unstructured data from onboarding documents, as well as to analyze images. Intelligent automation tools can be used to bring workflow automation to the mortgage approval process, allowing it to become far more efficient and consistent

Lockbox Processing

A lockbox is a service that financial institutions including commercial banks offer. Similar to a post office box to which companies have customers send correspondence, a lockbox is a service offered by commercial banks whereby companies can have their customers send payments to the bank. For a fee, the bank takes care of matching each payment to an invoice, helping to streamline the accounts receivable process for its client company.

Title & Deeds

When it comes to automating document processing, titles and deeds in particular present a vexing challenge. The reason is simple: these documents vary enormously depending on where they come from. Naturally, each county has its own forms for titles and deeds, and they are not all alike – far from it. Businesses that need to process lots of these kinds of documents have historically had to manually extract data from these forms and enter it into spreadsheets and other financial systems. Clearly these firms could benefit from process automation.

Financial document analysis

Investment banking firms can use IPA to analyze the financial health of companies before deciding whether to invest in them. Instead of poring over thousands of financial statements and manually extracting relevant data from each of them, IPA enables financial firms to automate the process, pulling out relevant data and normalizing it for insertion into data processing tools. The result is a dramatic improvement in speed and efficiency.

Invoice Processing Automation

Processing invoices is an issue that just about any large company struggles with – and one that’s ripe for automation. But it’s a classic example of an application where process automation software that relies on templates fails to deliver consistent results, for reasons that are easy to understand. When you have invoices from many different companies, you’re essentially dealing with unstructured data, which rule-based tools and template-based approaches to automation aren’t well-suited to handle. Intelligent process automation (IPA) tools, on the other hand, can handle unstructured data. IPA uses OCR, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to enable it to understand the context in a given document, enabling it to identify the relevant information you want to extract, without having to create a template for every variation of the invoices in question.

Corporate Inbox Automation

In the corporate Inbox use case, an intelligent process automation tool would be able to “read” an incoming email, discern what the topic is, then route it to an appropriate subject matter expert. For relatively simple matters, such as a change of address request, the IPA tool could extract the pertinent information and input it into an appropriate downstream system. An intelligent process tool can also extract and automate the handling of any attachments from an email, such as PDFs and Word documents. Here again the tool is smart enough to “read” the attachments and extract relevant data for input it into another downstream tool for processing or future reference, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Regulatory Compliance

Extract relevant data from insurance documents and feed it to an analytics engine to identify any areas where you may be running afoul of regulatory requirements. Indico Data can also help index data to simplify and speed responses to regulatory bodies.

Appraisal Processes

Intelligent Process Automation can streamline  processes involving unstructured documents from receipts, purchase and sale agreements, images, and contractor estimates. Reduce processing time by up to 85%.

Rent Rolls

Extracting data from rent rolls and converting to a structured format enables you to feed it to an analytics tool to gain insights into cash flow, turnover rates, vacancies, and opportunities as well as speed due diligence checks.

ISDA Master Agreements

ISDA Master Agreements, which spell out the terms between two parties regarding over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions, are notoriously complex and lengthy. The latest version, from 2002, is 28 pages long. Yet, it’s common that multiple subject matter experts (SMEs) must examine the documents and confirm terms are correct before executing a trade. Indico Data automates the process, dramatically reducing ISDA Master Agreement processing times.

Anti-money Laundering

Intelligent Process Automation can transform the verification and processing of client documents and monitoring of negative information. Indico Data machine learning models can help identify the warning signs of a money laundering risk by comparing to baseline data. You can also extract key data from various documents and feed them to an analytics engine that can identify suspicious activity.

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How IPA differs from BPM and RPA

Intelligent process automation builds upon existing processing automation technologies that also sought to streamline business processes, namely business process management (BPM), business process automation and robotic process automation (RPA).

Business Process Management

BPM and business process automation are focused on improving an existing business process. That often involves automating some steps in the process, although that’s not necessarily a requirement. It’s more about optimizing a process to make it more effective and efficient, often by using methodologies such as Six Sigma and Lean.

IPA and & RPA are complementary

As its name implies, RPA does involve process automation and works well with repetitive, deterministic business processes involving structured data – where there is no judgment involved. Tell it exactly what you need it to do and RPA can do it better, faster and cheaper than a human.

But if a task comes along that deviates from the pre-defined task, RPA will not be able to automate it. It cannot make judgments about information or learn and improve with experience. In that sense, RPA is different from machine learning and IPA.

For the same reason, RPA is ineffective with workflows involving unstructured data – those that require some level of cognitive ability. And this type of data makes up over 80% of the data in most enterprises today.

Because of IPA’s cognitive ability, it is very well-suited to work with business processes involving unstructured  data – all the text, documents, and images that drive many enterprise business processes today.

What is intelligent process automation?

IPA does not replace or compete with RPA. It complements it, handling the unstructured data, outputting it as structured data which can be re-inserted back into a business process that RPA can then address, leading to true digital transformation. IPA can pick up where RPA hits a roadblock in such diverse use cases as customer communications, report aggregation and insurance claims.

The ROI of Intelligent Process Automation

There are some rather impressive numbers in terms of return-on-investment for intelligent automation projects.

Suppose a given process involves 10 employees who each make $100,000/year, or $1 million total. The team performs 500,000 tasks per year dedicated to this process, so the cost per task is $2. Let’s say an IPA solution can automate 75% of those tasks, which is not at all unrealistic. The cost per task falls to just 50 cents and your annual gross savings is $750,000. Subtract the cost of the automation solution and you can calculate your ROI. (Hint: it will be huge.)

At the same time, you’re gaining soft benefits including increased employee satisfaction and productivity – because employees won’t be doing the same monotonous tasks every day, instead taking on more rewarding work. In the example above, you now have $750,000-worth of employee time to dedicate to other areas, dramatically increasing the capacity of the organization.

What’s more, the newly automated tasks will be performed with increased accuracy and consistency, which likewise saves money and helps ensure compliance with industry regulations.

Don’t take our word for it. We recently sat down with MetLife’s VP of Intelligent Automation to discuss the company’s automation journey from solving simplistic tasks with RPA to deploying Intelligent Process Automation to automate unstructured document-based workflows. MetLife has found $100M in value through hours saved that they can unlock in the next 5 years for their businesses by using Intelligent Process Automation on unstructured data. You can watch the full interview here.

Benefits of Intelligent Process Automation

85% reduction in process cycle times
Drive customer satisfaction and quicker time to market for new initiatives

4x increase in process capacity
Scale critical processes without increasing expenses, for more cost-efficient back office functions

80% reduction in human resources
Free up critical resources to work on higher value-add projects rather than repetitive low-value tasks

Ease of use
No data science expertise required

1000x less training data required
As compared to traditional artificial intelligence solutions

Built for unstructured data
Works with text, documents and images to automate almost any business process

Unstructured Unlocked podcast

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Unstructured Unlocked episode 41 with Charles Morris, Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft

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February 13, 2024 | E40

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