Every day, businesses like insurance companies face a mountain of paperwork with claims to process, invoices to reconcile, and contracts to review. These documents generate massive amounts of unstructured data, which is difficult to consume and analyze. The manual handling of these documents is time-consuming, expensive, and often leads to errors and delays. Digitizing these documents is critical for creating timely, structured data that drives business decisions and enables workflow automation.
Enter intelligent document processing (IDP), a transformative technology revolutionizing how organizations handle unstructured data. By merging AI and machine learning (ML) with robotic process automation (RPA), IDP automates data extraction, interpretation, and processing of information from diverse document types. Imagine an insurance company processing thousands of claims daily, involving handwritten forms, scanned documents, and emails. With IDP, the insurance company can automatically classify claim types, extract relevant data, and validate the information for accuracy, drastically reducing manual effort while expediting claim approvals. IDP offers consistent, intelligent workflows that adapt and improve over time, providing a smarter, faster alternative to traditional document management and optical character recognition (OCR) systems.
The impact is undeniable: according to a MarketsandMarkets report, the global IDP market is projected to grow from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $5.2 billion by 2027, reflecting a staggering compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.5%. As hyperautomation reshapes the business landscape, IDP has become indispensable across industries like finance, healthcare, and logistics, where document-heavy processes demand both accuracy and efficiency. By delivering up to 70% cost savings, IDP is enabling organizations to thrive in a data-driven world.
Why intelligent document processing is essential for modern organizations
Organizations today are inundated with unstructured data, such as emails, fax, PDFs, invoices, and handwritten forms. According to IDC, 80-90% of business data is unstructured, making it difficult to process using traditional automation tools. This poses significant challenges, including:
- High cost of specialized resources required for processes such as prior authorization demand an understanding of context-sensitive business rules
- Inefficient workflows caused by manual document handling
- Increased costs due to time-intensive data extraction and validation
- Human errors that affect data accuracy and decision-making
- Scalability issues when manually managing large document volumes
IDP addresses these challenges by automating the processing of unstructured data, enabling organizations to achieve greater efficiency and accuracy.
What are the benefits of intelligent document processing?
By implementing IDP, organizations unlock a range of benefits, including:
- Improved accuracy: Alithya’s IDP solution leverages AI models and machine learning to achieve extraction accuracy rates of up to 99.9%, surpassing the reliability of traditional, manual methods.
- Cost reduction: Automating document processing can cut operational costs by up to 70%.
- Enhanced productivity: IDP significantly reduces the time spent on manual document handling, allowing employees to focus on higher-value tasks. For example, Alithya’s IDP solution achieves a productivity rate of up to 50 claims per hour for quality assurance (QA).
- Business growth: IDP platforms handle high volumes of documents efficiently, supporting business growth without adding headcount. Alithya helps customers process between 4 to 5 million faxed pages per month with our proprietary IDP solution.
- Data-driven decisions: Structured data extracted by IDP tools improves analytics and enables better decision-making.
Alithya has taken 100% manual processes and added up to 80% zero-touch automation, significantly streamlining workflows and reducing human intervention through enterprise AI solutions.
How intelligent document processing works
Intelligent document processing is more than just automation—it’s a powerful system that transforms disorganized data into actionable insights. Whether it’s digitizing handwritten forms or extracting critical data from a PDF, IDP enables organizations to process vast volumes of documents with precision and speed. But how exactly does IDP achieve this? Let’s break it down.
Understanding document formats and components
To appreciate intelligent document processing’s capabilities, it's crucial to understand the types of documents it processes.
Document formats
- Physical documents: Handwritten forms, printed papers, and scanned images that require digitization.
- Digital documents: Emails, faxes, PDFs, spreadsheets, and other electronic files.
Document components
- Structured documents: Clearly defined formats, such as invoices or tax forms.
- Unstructured documents: Free-form text like contracts or emails.
- Semi-structured documents: Hybrid formats with both structured and unstructured elements, such as purchase orders or resumes.
The intelligent document processing workflow
IDP follows a multi-step process that combines advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) to transform raw documents into usable data:
- Capture and ingestion: Documents are brought into the system via scanning, email integration, or digital uploads. Whether it’s a high-volume batch of invoices or a single scanned form, the system handles all formats seamlessly.
- Document preprocessing: Before data extraction begins, IDP enhances document quality through processes like noise removal, image correction, and normalization. This ensures even low-quality scans are readable and usable.
- Document classification: Using AI models, the system identifies the document type - whether it is an invoice, receipt, or contract - and then it automatically routes it for further processing.
- Data extraction: Machine learning and NLP tools extract key information, such as names, dates, or amounts, from the document. Advanced OCR technology ensures that even handwritten text or complex layouts are captured accurately.
- Validation and feedback loop: Extracted data is cross-checked for accuracy against predefined rules or databases. The system learns from errors through a feedback loop, improving performance over time.
- Export: Finally, validated data is integrated into enterprise systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise content management (ECM), customer relationship management (CRM), or workflow automation tools. IDP can also sync seamlessly with RPA platforms to enable full end-to-end automation. For Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), IDP generates and formats data outputs in compliance with global standards including 837s, 835s, FHIR, or HL7.
- Beyond IDP - contextual recommendations: IDP becomes more than an extraction tool when combined with business-specific rules and industry data models. By integrating hyperautomation, IDP evolves into a recommendation engine, enabling tasks like identifying prior authorization types, flagging fraud in loan applications, and triggering automated correspondence. This shift allows businesses to achieve smarter workflows and more informed decision-making.
A strategic enabler for enterprise content management (ECM)
Intelligent document processing transforms ECM systems into dynamic, intelligent solutions by addressing the challenges posed by unstructured data. While ECM systems excel at storing, organizing, and granting access to structured content, they often struggle to handle the diverse, unstructured documents that dominate modern business workflows. IDP bridges this gap by automating the classification, extraction, and organization of data, ensuring even the most complex inputs are processed seamlessly and integrated into your ECM system.
One of IDP’s greatest strengths is its ability to enrich incoming data, turning it into actionable insights. By extracting critical information and applying intelligent tagging, IDP makes content stored in the ECM system easily searchable and retrievable. Employees can quickly locate crucial details, such as a specific contract clause or invoice data, significantly improving both productivity and decision-making.
In addition, IDP enhances ECM compliance capabilities by automatically validating document data against regulatory standards and governance rules. Sensitive information, like customer account details or personal identifiers, can be flagged, categorized, or encrypted before entering the ECM system, mitigating risks and ensuring adherence to privacy laws such as GDPR or HIPAA.
By embedding IDP into your ECM strategy, you unlock a powerful combination that transforms your ECM system from a static repository into an intelligent, operational hub. This integration drives efficiency, strengthens compliance, and enables smarter, data-driven decisions, positioning your enterprise for success in a fast-paced, information-driven world.
Beyond ECM: IDP delivers value across the enterprise
Intelligent document processing isn’t limited to ECM systems—it’s a versatile technology that amplifies efficiency across a range of enterprise platforms. By seamlessly feeding structured data into various systems, IDP helps businesses automate processes, improve data accuracy, and make smarter decisions:
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP): IDP accelerates finance and operations by extracting data from invoices, purchase orders, and expense reports, then feeding it into ERP systems like Microsoft D365, SAP or Oracle. This eliminates manual entry, improves processing times, and ensures data accuracy.
- Customer relationship management (CRM): By extracting customer data from forms, emails, and contracts, IDP keeps CRM systems like Salesforce and Dynamics 365 updated with accurate, real-time information, enabling teams to respond faster and deliver personalized service.
- Human capital management (HCM): IDP streamlines HR processes by digitizing resumes, onboarding forms, and performance reviews, feeding the data directly into HR platforms to automate recruitment, record updates, and compliance tracking.
- Supply chain management (SCM): Shipping documents, customs forms, and vendor invoices can be processed by IDP to feed SCM systems, improving logistics planning, real-time tracking, and invoice approvals.
- Contract lifecycle management (CLM): IDP helps legal teams extract key terms, clauses, and deadlines from contracts, automating compliance and tracking within CLM systems.
- Industry-specific applications: IDP’s versatility extends to specialized systems to automate prior authorization processes in healthcare, underwriting and risk analysis in banking, or audit analysis in manufacturing, to speed up processing times and improve the customer experience.
By integrating with these platforms, IDP acts as a cornerstone for operational excellence, enhancing data quality and enabling seamless information flow across the enterprise.
Don't wait to unlock efficiency and innovation with IDP
Adopting intelligent document processing isn’t just about upgrading your tech – it’s about transforming the way your business operates. Manual document handling and unstructured data slow businesses down, but IDP changes the game. It streamlines workflows, enhances accuracy, and empowers your team to focus on strategic, high-value work instead of repetitive tasks.
We’d love to explore how intelligent document processing can unlock efficiency and innovation for your organization. Contact us to start a conversation.