Time-to-Value: The Demand

If there is one thing we have learned here at Ephesoft, over the years prospects and customers have grown more and more intolerant of long deployment projects and high professional services bills. The rise of applications that come preconfigured, or immediately provide value with minimal configuration, are expected and now considered the norm.

New Developments in Intelligent Document Processing and RPA

In the document capture space, now called intelligent document processing (IDP), there have always been several barriers to a rapid return on investment:

  • Infrastructure deployment – The setup of servers, cloud instances or nodes customized for scale and specific customer’s use cases can be long and drawn out.
  • Configuration Services – Legacy providers have “out-of-the-box” static configurations that get mediocre results at best and require templates and extensive tweaking to provide less than adequate results.
  • Integration – The complexities of having a process work hand-in-hand with a repository or system of record, typically requires some custom work or code.
  • Periodic Updates – The flow of documents into an organization are dynamic and ever-changing. Vendors change their invoice format, forms are revised and new types popup constantly.

These factors have slowly been remediated over the past five years or so, mostly due to the entrance into the market of robotic process automation (RPA) and the redefining of what constitutes a true document processing solution. Cloud or simple desktop installations removed the need for extensive infrastructure. Applications became targeted at the “Citizen Developer” and anyone could build a flow, supposedly. Integrations became handled by a screen scraping army of bots. And the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) was the savior in regard to the endless stream of tweaks required to keep the system at peak accuracy. Or so we all thought.

Reality Hits Home

Intelligent document capture is hard. Processing documents that are received by an organization can be summed up by the 80/20 rule. It’s easy to get 80% accuracy in data extraction. Everyone can do it. That is the nature of the beast. But the real value or the secret sauce is getting that elusive 20% that takes up 80% of their time. Legacy capture solutions on the market just can’t get there and we see over and over that prospects struggle to keep even 80% accuracy alive.

The Solution

Over the past year at Ephesoft, we have been focusing on our next-generation product, or what I like to call the “20% killer.” Semantik is our cloud-based document AI platform that has been built to take customers and future customers to the next level. We focused on using AI to tackle the hard problems, not the easy ones. Turn it on, do some basic configuration, and be up and running almost immediately with results. Semantik Invoice was built on hundreds of thousands of data samples along with input from our customers, partners and employees. It provides unmatched accuracy out-of-the-box in competitive tests and can fit the needs of large and small customers alike.

The Next Phase:  Integration – The Uber Plug

Pundits estimate that over 60% of all business processes include documents or records. Think about all the flows within your organization that include a PDF, the scanning of paper, images from phones, etc. Invoices, sales orders, paper mail (!), forms, NDAs, forms and on and on. There are hundreds of these micro-processes that go on every day, killing productivity and preventing employees from performing at higher level, higher-value tasks. What if those employees were empowered to simply tap into an automation service for documents? What if they could use a familiar application to build their own intelligent document process?

Today, at Ephesoft, we are launching a new series of connectors to empower Citizen Developers with a document automation toolset to free up time and improve their productivity levels with a simple point and click (no code) setup. The connectors also provide unmatched integration capabilities and broaden the opportunity for productivity improvements across all enterprise applications. Here are our current connector toolsets available:

  • Semantik for Invoices – Microsoft Power Platform – This connector was built and certified through Microsoft and provides any business flow extracted invoice data. As a certified connector, it is available in the connector library for Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps and Power Apps. You can see the profile here: Ephesoft Semantik Connector for Power Automate.
  • Semantik for Invoices – Workato Shared Connector – Leverage our shared connector through any recipe using Workato. Contact us for free trial access to the Semantik for Workato Connector.
  • Ephesoft Transact Connectors for Power Automate and Workato – Visit our community connectors available for Ephesoft Transact within our Ephesoft Labs GitHub Repository.
  • Ephesoft to Catalytic allows you to easily add no-code workflows and automations to analyze and process extracted data.

For more information on our integration platform and connectors, contact us today.