Editor’s note: If you opt for advanced document management, look closely at document automation trends that focus on leveraging smart technologies. If, after exploring these trends in our article, you are still puzzled by the choice, you’re welcome to ask ScienceSoft’s experts for a free consultation.

Businesses all over the world welcome digital transformation of document management that allows them to go paperless and automate document-related activities. In 2020, this process will be governed by such trends as leveraging cloud-based software, integration with social media, more extensive usage of born-digital documents, e-signature, and more.

Smart technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning stand out in document automation trends for 2020. SharePoint, one of the most popular collaboration platforms today, keeps up with these trends easily due to its high flexibility and ability to integrate with other systems. ScienceSoft has been delivering SharePoint customization and consulting services since 2007, and knows well how to create a robust SharePoint-based document management system (DMS). And we are certain that intelligent technologies are crucial to meet the modern document needs, especially in large organizations. In the article, we’ll share document automation trends driven by intelligent technologies that we use in our projects.

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Intelligent process automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) allows automating repetitive tasks, for example, creating documents and reports. RPA integration with AI technologies like machine learning brings about intelligent process automation (IPA). As compared to RPA, IPA is not strictly rule-based. It’s a scalable technology that allows adapting to changing data and conditions, which makes it suitable for automating complex variable processes. For example, IPA allows determining that the payments are due and automatically generating and sending reminders to vendors, customers and business partners accordingly.

Handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition is enabled via combining machine learning and advanced document capturing. Thus, document capture software digitizes documents with handwriting, for example, in postal addresses, bank check amounts or medical forms. Then machine learning algorithms recognize handwriting. Neural networks allow recognizing even cursive handwriting with high accuracy.

Interactive documents

Interactive documents have embedded audio or video files, photo galleries, hyperlinks and navigational buttons. They show places for e-signatures, which makes working with them engaging and quick. Thus, it takes just a few clicks on a tablet to finalize a contract.

Intelligent document analysis

This technology uses natural language processing and machine learning to derive insights from unstructured data like text documents and images. Intelligent document analysis uses various document understanding techniques, such as:

Text classification enables assigning a document to one or several categories based on individual words, phrases, headings, metadata, and even imbedded images. It is used, for example, for routing a document to relevant specialists, which helps save time and resources.

Text similarity allows detecting duplicates or near-duplicates in a document or its parts. It helps remove outdated versions of documents to avoid confusion and save space in document storage.

Summarization helps make a summary of a document for users to get the gist of large-volume documents without fully reading them. This technique detects, picks up and connects the key sentences without modifying them. Also, a document can be paraphrased to create a cohesive, shortened text. The latter is possible when natural language generation, a technology that generates text based on structured data, is used.

Follow the trends

Smart technologies will shape document management in 2020 and beyond, completing its transformation into intelligent information management. If you want to keep up with the times and integrate intuitive features in your document-driven business processes, ScienceSoft’s specialists will show you where to start.

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