What is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)?

Ask a variety of different people and organizations what IDP is and you’ll likely get a variety of different answers to this question - even in conversation around the TCG Process coffee machine this is often a hotly debated topic! Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is, in some ways, just an industry term that was developed to try and distinguish the difference between plain old capture and something more exciting. But the thing is, many companies now use the term, and quite broadly - sometimes they are referring simply to data capture and other times it is much more about analyzing content to extract meaning, intent and sentiment.

Learn more about data and document capture

Confusing, right? We thought it would be useful to offer a different perspective, concentrating more on the challenge we are trying to solve than the technologies employed.

The challenge IDP is trying to solve

Nowadays, organizations are dealing with an overwhelming amount of data, data which is transferred across an ever-increasing number of channels and in almost unlimited formats. With so much data, it can be difficult and time consuming to extract meaningful and valuable insights from the irrelevant noise.

Modern organizations typically have high volumes of three types of document-driven data: structured, unstructured, and semi-structured. Structured data is organized and more easily read by human data processors, whereas unstructured data is more challenging and time-consuming to process and analyze. Semi-structured data is somewhere in between. With IDP solutions, it is possible to automate data processing for structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data.

Intelligent document processing goes beyond simply capturing data from documents, extracting useful information and generating insights from the data contained within those documents - regardless of the original format of the document.

Modern IDP Solutions

We are often now seeing articles from startups who talk about “the problem with OCR”. To try and disrupt the market they make sensational claims about reliance on templates and OCR accuracy rates, which ironically highlights a lack of understanding in the space as most established vendors ended their reliance on such things quite some time ago – almost forgetting about such topics.

A good solution for intelligent document processing combines technologies and approaches to deliver the right solution for a customer problem. Any solution that only offers one approach (regardless of how good it looks in a demo) will eventually be found wanting when it comes to delivering real business benefit.

Expanding upon IDP

At TCG Process, we believe the evolution beyond IDP is intelligent process automation. IDP ends with collected data or business information, but it is data that needs context and a process executed to achieve an end goal (e.g. for an account to be opened, for an insurance claim to be processed, an invoice to be paid, a loan to be granted, a new employee onboarded, etc.)

Intelligent process automation provides this end-to-end document processing solution. There are all of the necessary IDP capabilities, and yes, there can be (and likely are) integrations with other systems, but all of the steps in a process that are required for business data entering an organization to deliver an end result can be captured, configured, automated and orchestrated from one single solution, allowing you to process the information needed to respond to your customers and make decisions, faster.

The key to transformation

It is clear that IDP can deliver huge benefits, such as eliminating the need for manual data entry and processing workers. This not only increases the speed at which data can be processed, but also reduces costs by minimizing human effort, delivers greater efficiency and allows humans to concentrate on more valuable tasks.

But to really transform your organizations processes and customer interactions, intelligent document processing must be incorporated into your business processes - a process that does more than digitize and index documents, more than simply identify valuable information and provide insights, but uses that collected information for complete end-to-end processing.

Find out how TCG Process combines IDP with business process automation to provide organizations with an end-to-end intelligent process automation solution.