The idea of ​​the paperless office has been around for decades, but few companies have been able to achieve anything close to this idea. With all the technological advancements we’ve had, why is it still so difficult for companies to move away from their people and paper-based processes? It is perhaps not surprising that organizations are still inundated with paper. However, for companies looking to gain insight and extract value from their data, they need to put that data in a state where computers are able to process it. To do this, businesses need to digitize and digitize their information and processes.

However, before companies can even think about digitization or digital transformation, they must first digitize according to a recent report from the AI ​​analyst firm Cognilytica. There are many industries that have historically been heavy on documents and paper in their processes. Sectors such as insurance, mortgages, finance, and health care are all riddled with paper documents and forms. In addition, there are many manual and paper-based processes that almost every industry faces, such as invoice and payment processing, human resources, or mailroom operations. However, many companies in these sectors are transforming the way they operate to become more digital and digitized in their processes. So how do they do it? (disclosure: I am an analyst at Cognilytica)

Digitization of the mortgage industry

According to a Mortgage Bankers Association report, in 2016 the net cost of taking out a residential mortgage increased to $ 7,120, a four-fold increase from just ten years ago. This increase is due to the heavy human processes still required, and the double and triple manual controls in place. Moving away from these manual processes speeds up processing times, cuts costs, and creates more predictable experiences.

The mortgage industry has mainly turned to electronic documents, digitizing all types of paper forms required during the creation and closing process and embracing digital signatures as part of their move to digitize their processes. Digitization allows lenders to further automate compliance processes and remove manual processes, automating loan review and reducing error rates with fewer resources. This digitization is transforming the mortgage industry by improving regulatory compliance, improving the customer experience, increasing asset quality, reducing risk and improving efficiency and cost containment.

Digitized mortgage processes have enabled a variety of automated processes, including underwriting, mortgage processing, closing, and quality control. This enables organizations not only to store copies of borrower documents, but also to use the information in the documents to obtain data from third-party systems, which speeds up processes and improves information for decision-making. . Additionally, digitization has enabled electronic fences, also known as electronic fences, where you can close a mortgage electronically.

Digitization of the invoicing process

For many businesses in just about every industry, the invoicing process is still surprisingly very manual and paper-based. Depending on the size of the business, they may have hundreds or thousands of vendors that they work with. Each supplier has a slightly different look and feel of their invoice. By scanning these documents, computers are now able to do the heavy lifting which was previously left to employees. Computers are able to automatically identify various key fields such as company name, payment amount, due date, and additional critical information, as well as automatically store a digital copy of the invoice. This makes it much easier to find and find invoices several months or years later.

Companies that implement advanced invoice processing solutions use digitization approaches to capture invoices upfront and automatically enter data into payment or ERP systems for subsequent payment. Advanced systems can even automatically verify that invoices are received from approved suppliers and that invoices match purchase orders and order items. These checks can save significant time, speed up invoice processing, and reduce invoice processing costs.

How the insurance industry is going digital

An industry long known for producing a lot of paper, insurers are no strangers to tedious human and paper processes. Incoming documents including application submissions, inquiries, customer service request letters and many other types of business documents in the form of letters, envelopes, forms, faxes and checks in paper format may be sent out. add up quickly. In fact, one of America’s largest insurers has over three million boxes of archived paper documents.

Many advanced insurers have scanned documents in their subscription process. Underwriting correspondence, insurance quotes, policies, quotes, invoicing and statements have been widely digitized by the industry over the past decade. Insurers typically digitally capture documents very early in the business process when documents are first received by the business, rather than scanning them after they have been handled by humans, which means most of insurance workers only interact with documents in digital format. Digital capture systems capture the document and automatically bundle it with related documents, while automatically extracting key information, automatically categorizing documents and indexing them for later retrieval. Leading insurers are taking it to the next level by applying analytics to customer interactions, giving them the power to personalize and further improve the customer experience.

The industry has also widely adopted electronic signatures, thereby avoiding the need for direct paper-based interaction with customers. Agents and brokers are also employed to ingest documents into insurance systems in a first digital format via information portals. Indeed, almost all areas of interaction within insurance are affected by digitization, from customer interactions to underwriting and claims management. This helps speed up processing, reduce the time and costs of processing complaints, reduce fraud and risk, and improve customer satisfaction.

The impact of AI on digitization

Digitization is needed to meet higher level AI requirements. Without good, clean data, machine learning systems cannot produce valuable results. For organizations that want to start applying AI and ML, their data needs to be in a usable state. While digitization efforts are not new, there are leading and best practices that should be studied and adopted to do so in a thoughtful manner. Once the digitization ‘springboard’ layer is applied, AI and cognitive technologies can then be added to extract useful value and acquire information and learn from various forms of content and the intelligence of the content and l cognitive automation can be applied.