Garbage In, Garbage Out: Priming Organizations for Success at the Dawn of Automation

There’s one question you need to ask today to ensure your company doesn’t close the door on future automation opportunities. Most businesses are not asking it.

Automation stands to transform business in a way not seen since the Industrial Revolution. It follows a 30-year race by companies to harness filing cabinets, records rooms, and entire warehouses of paper-based information through digitization. The adoption of Electronic Document Management was an important first step.

Now we’re beginning a new race, one in which the automation of business processes by seamlessly inserting data into business workflows is paramount to success. The winners will see increases in efficiency that positions them for market leadership. To the surprise of many, it turns out that attention to detail in the previous race toward digital transformation is one of the biggest factors in successfully automating document-intensive workflows.

Automation Now!

It isn’t too late to take advantage of automation opportunities. According to AIIM, 33% of enterprises use manual processes and paper-based workflows and 67% of businesses have automated less than half of their processes. Automation technologies can make accurate data shine, but they aren’t a magic wand, and they aren’t infallible. If original documents aren’t accurately classified and converted to useful structured data at the point of capture, opportunities are missed and catching up becomes harder with each subsequent document scanned.

Let’s take a scenario of integrating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) into a forms processing workflow in a busy hospital. Forms arrive at a reception desk with patient information that needs to be scanned. From there, an RPA bot takes key identifiers from the forms and cross-references them with a patient database, verifying information with external insurance providers, updating internal records so patients receive care quickly, and collating the data in new formats in other systems. In these situations, accuracy is critical, and a mis-read character can lead to incorrect billing, duplicate records, or in the worst cases, improper treatment. Scaled to over 100 million patients annually, mistakes in the capture stage could account for millions of dollars in lost efficiency, database cleanup, and repeat visits.

These costs add up and negate improvements achieved by RPA. Similar liabilities exist in any business where opportunities to automate document management exist. The value you can extract from automation technologies is limited by the quality of upstream data captured as part of the document management process. Ask one question today to ensure you aren’t left with a mountain of unstructured, useless data to clean up when opportunities arise.