Up to now, automation projects have been generally focused business processes, which were able to exchange and handle information electronically. Paper-based documents like invoices have thereby often been disregarded, even though a high percentage (approx. 80%) of information occurred in a company is based upon paper documents and therewith unstructured data.
But today, these documents can mostly be processed electronically and therewith automatically – especially here a huge potential for cost savings is provided.
Process automation
The basis for the electronic processing of paper documents is the standardized and process-oriented inubit solution "Paper2Process". Herewith data from traditional media like paper and fax are forwarded automatically to processes and provided in backend-systems for further treatment.
Thereby, particular processes can fast be adapted to specific requirements. The reduction of media breaks is accomplished by an early scanning of the incoming paper documents and accordingly the interception of the documents at the fax server.
The next step is an analysis to clarify in the first instance, what kind of business process (e.g. order, invoice, reclamation, etc.) and what business partner the activity is about. Afterwards all data is read and validated from the document via Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). During this process an alignment with the data of internal systems can already be effected. Documents with a low recognition rate can be validated and if necessary enhanced with data over a workflow by the responsible employees.
After the automated archiving of the documents by using the already recognized information for indexation, the accordant business case can be finished by the appropriate employees with an alignment of the affected systems and finally get deallocated. Since this is effected workflow-based as well, colleagues can be involved or critical documents can be escalated at any time. After finishing the processing of the certain business case, data are forwarded to the relevant internal IT systems for final booking or archiving.
Automating the acquisition of data and the entire downstream process not only reduces a multitude of possible errors, but first of all avoids slow and error-prone paper circulations within the company.
In addition real-time evaluation allows the measuring of the business process' efficiency and provides the necessary information to the management at any time, to valuate and - if necessary - to optimize the processes. Finally this enables companies to reduce significantly and lastingly their administrative costs.
