The Contest Begins

Running from July to August, Ephesoft’s APAC team hosted their first Hackaton. Thirteen teams consisting of 38 individuals from a broad spectrum of organizations, small and large, signed up for the challenge to develop the best solutions in APAC for Ephesoft Transact, our intelligent document processing (IDP) platform. The stakes were high with cash prizes, free training and award certificates.

Participating companies included Adecco India, Copernicus, DBS Bank, Hexaware, Kodak Alaris, Microgenesis Techsoft Pvt Ltd, NTT Data Singapore, PT Medlinx Asia Teknologi, PwC Singapore, Sunway ITSSC Shared Services, Sunway Quantum Sdn Bhd, Sunway Shared Services, TRG and Workato. The Hackathon was open to customers, partners and anyone interested.

The teams presented a variety of different solutions to the Ephesoft judges, including Ike Kavas, Founder & CEO, Kevin Harbauer, CTO, Darin Pendergraft, VP Product Marketing and myself, VP, APAC.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the exciting projects:

Workato’s team used automating invoices in the accounting department using Slack as a connector. Using the power of Ephesoft and Slack with their own solution, the Workato team automated an end-to-end flow of invoice processing.

 

 

 

 

Sunway Group is one of Malaysia’s leading conglomerates with 13 business divisions operating across more than 50 locations, primarily in the Asian region. Sunway aspires to be Asia’s model corporation in sustainable development and its award-winning, flagship Sunway City Kuala Lumpur is a smart, sustainable city that serves as a blueprint for Sunway to transform its portfolios nationwide into low-carbon cities. Sunway’s Group Sustainability Department was tasked to compile and analyse sustainability data extracted from a diverse range of hardcopy invoices from its utility vendors. With over thousands of documents to inspect, the process is time-consuming and susceptible to errors.

Leveraging Ephesoft Transact’s IDP technology, Sunway was able to extract utilities data such as energy consumption and water usage, among others, from scanned images or PDF documents procured from respective vendor portals. These extracted data provide in-depth insights to the Group to engender strategic business decisions. For example, electricity consumption reduction strategies can now be generated by introducing renewable energy sources and the implementation of the Eco-Walk, a solar-powered canopy walkway interconnecting major hotspots within Sunway City Kuala Lumpur. Ephesoft Transact’s flexibility in extracting key values and tables has benefited the automation process in acquiring the data more accurately and quickly, thus creating FTE capacity for the Group’s Sustainability Department to perform more value-added tasks.

Across the lake at Sunway Theme Parks, Sunway also utilised Ephesoft Transact to extract financial data from the theme parks’ daily revenue collections. As Theme Parks sales generate receipts, credit card slips, income reports from the Point of Sales system, as well as various discount vouchers and coupons, Transact’s versatility and ability to incorporate custom scripting allowed the Group’s developers to address several challenging data extraction scenarios the team encountered. The outcome? Vastly improved productivity for the finance and treasury personnel who previously had to manually read and key in all of the information from the documents provided. It also afforded a greater degree of reconciliation that would not be practical if done manually.

Both of Sunway’s teams demonstrated how they optimally utilised Ephesoft Transact by automating their theme park ticketing system and pulling data for their sustainability reports.

Medlinx created a solution to streamline claims processing for their healthcare customers. The team explained, “In the healthcare industry, especially for claims processing, many healthcare providers are struggling with many handprinted forms and poor quality scanned documents. Other challenges with high paper volumes and manual data entry will lead to slow processes and a bad customer experience.”

“With Ephesoft Transact, we are providing a claims automation solution for our healthcare customers to automate and streamline claims processes to leverage and organize all important data, both structured and unstructured. Using Transact, we can auto-categorize all various document types and auto-extract data from any machine-printed or handprinted documents. This will definitely save significant time and effort while also providing high accuracy results that will expedite claims processes so the staff can focus more time and effort for making better business decisions instead of paperwork and manual data entry.”

PwC Singapore’s submission was focused on solving a problem in the financial sector, specifically tax. The problem they addressed was to identify and extract data from audited financial statements in an efficient and effective manner.

In order to achieve this, for this Hackathon, the team leveraged Ephesoft Transact to extract the data from PDF documents, then transformed the data into a visual-ready format using a data analytics and automation tool, followed by utilizing data visualization to create a dashboard so that the information could be consumed in a visual manner and business critical insights could be gained from the information.

The main objective of the solution was to extract the data as accurately as possible with minimal human intervention, and then automate and integrate the tools to create an end-to-end solution that was seamless for the end-user.

The Winners

It was a tight finish with so many amazing solutions that were presented to the judges. “I was so impressed with all of the participants, so it was a really hard choice,” said Ike Kavas.

  • First place went to PT Medlinx Asia Teknologi for their claim processing solution.
  • Second place was a tie for the two Sunway teams for their theme park and sustainability report automation project.
  • Third place was awarded to PwC Singapore for their data extraction of financial statements.

Additionally, there were award recognitions to Kodak Alaris for “Most Innovative” for their property management solution; DBS Bank took the “Most Scalable Business Solution” for their document tables extraction; Sunway claimed the “Sustainable Solution Award”; and PwC Singapore earned the “Best Integrated Solution.” All participants received a certificate of achievement.

Congratulations to all the participants and we are looking forward to our next Hackathon in 2022!