Having the right content capture platform for RPA is necessary to ensure your project’s success. After attending UiPath Forward’s recent conference, we’ll discuss why the industry is talking about the importance of intelligent capture, how it relates to Ephesoft’s Activities in UiPath and the Web Services that power them. It’s time to cut through the noise and sort through what is really happening in this space.
For everyone that just attended UiPath Forward, you probably noticed all the buzz around AI-powered capture. It was difficult to turn a corner without running into a vendor extolling the potential of their hot new release of data intelligence for documents. And, if you’re like me, you probably couldn’t help but recall all the recent coverage of over-hyped and under-performing machine learning-based applications in the RPA space.
The Everest Group coined this burgeoning market category of capture vendors as Intelligent Document Processing, and analysts forecasted this market will grow by 80-90% over the next two years. Given this purported future, it’s no wonder that every RPA company and document-minded tech company is dipping its toes into the capture ocean. But there’s some risk to these newly released products, many of which seem to be an alpha version of the application rather than a production-ready product.
As we’ve seen from the announcements at UiPath Forward and other major RPA players, one aspect of process automation is clear: document intelligence is critical to the success of any RPA implementation. In fact, it’s estimated that over half of all business processes involve documents at some portion of their workflow. Given that, along with the Everest Group’s prediction of this market’s growth, it bears repeating that it’s not surprising so many RPA vendors and startups are trying to wrap their hands around content capture. So, with the aim of adding document intelligence to robotic workflows, most RPA systems now offer capture tools out of the box. Earlier this year, Gartner claimed that capture “is tangential to the core of RPA.” And out of nowhere OCR – or the conversion of image-only files to text-searchable documents – became shiny and new again. Let’s face it, OCR has been a lackluster, functional-but-boring tool since the 1980s.
But a capture tool that simply renders documents text searchable or looks for fields of information based on zonal regions of a page is going to fall short for most enterprise capture needs. If you want your bot to become truly document-aware, you should look to a company that specializes in intelligent capture and is agnostic to the RPA or BPM tool running behind the scenes.
As one of the top RPA analysts at the Everest Group, Sarah Burnett, says, “Intelligent Document Processing solutions offer a compelling value proposition for enterprises that face challenges in increasing process efficiency and accuracy.” While there’s a tremendous opportunity, it’s important to look for solutions and vendors that deliver results, not just an overhyped promise of Minority Report-level data extraction.
At Ephesoft, we believe in delivering both innovation and results. Ephesoft Transact, our flagship product, was built to support automated document conversion, categorization and data extraction to accelerate information processing and overcome expensive human errors. Transact uses a combination of supervised machine learning and rules-based logic to achieve high accuracy of extracted metadata with minimal samples required. We’ve seen a decrease in document processing time by more than 80% for many of our customers and an overall project set up time as significantly shorter than many of our competitors. Moreover, as a company, our sole focus is on intelligent capture. Almost ten years of experience in this market gives us an edge over many of the newer “jumping on the bandwagon” vendors hitting the scene.
As it relates to UiPath, Ephesoft Transact Activities are available for download in the UiPath Go marketplace and can be found in the Integrations tab of the Activities window once they’ve been downloaded. It’s a simple task to drag and drop an activity into the design studio and configure that task to send documents to a specified Ephesoft Transact server. Depending on which Activity you choose for your process, you can easily start a batch of documents to be processed by a selected project, just return the extracted values, return split, categorized documents and their associated metadata, and more.
These Activities are essentially visual objects that act as wrappers around the Ephesoft Web Services that are available for developers. The Ephesoft Transact Web Services API provides a simple method for real-time integration and exposure of Ephesoft Transact processes to external applications. This allows developers to embed and employ smart capture capabilities and technologies in content management systems, BPM tools and – most relevant to this blog post – RPA systems. They allow for bidirectional communication between UiPath and the Ephesoft Transact server for a seamlessly integrated workflow. This means no more bad data or error-stalled bots in your organization’s document review and data processing workflow.
To watch a demonstration of Ephesoft Transact and UiPath working together to automate a tax form capture process, click the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiLQUGwV27E&feature=youtu.be.
