The word scalability is almost guaranteed to come up in any discussion of tech solutions. The idea of growth is encoded into the idea of business itself, and so any business tool worth the investment has to account for that.
For large, data-hungry organizations—think: insurance companies, financial services providers or business process outsourcers (BPOs)—tech has to fulfill a dual role of facilitating and then handling growth. Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a key technology that addresses these needs, offering scalable solutions for managing and automating document workflows.
When scalability is the product itself
This need for seamless scalability is not only the ticket to winning new business, it’s also vital to keeping that business. If acquiring new customers adversely affects the level of service a BPO provides existing customers, they’ll quickly run up against the limit of growth. To remain competitive and viable, a BPO needs to be able to add to its workload without any service disruptions.
4 obstacles to scaling document processing
1. Limitations to their existing tech stack
The two main technologies involved in document processing—Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—have drawbacks when it comes to the accuracy at which they can “read” documents. How the technology receives the scanned document image makes a huge difference in the data capture results.
OCR has been a game-changer, but only for type-written and legible documents; accuracy drops off sharply with handwritten, poorly imaged and/or faxed documents. AI can act as a stop-gap solution for what OCR misses, but even then accuracy tops out at about 95-98%. A 2% error rate might not sound like much, but remember we’re trying to scale up here: errors, unfortunately, come along for that ride.
In order to meet SLAs for both turnaround time and accuracy, human intelligence—often referred to as Human In The Loop (HITL) functionality—is required to manage these exceptions and reach the highest levels of accuracy. As you likely know, scaling your workforce up is a lot slower and more expensive than scaling your tech.
2. Staffing challenges
This is why any conversation about scalability is also a conversation about keeping your staff happy. A company is only as agile as its workforce. Disgruntled and / or overworked staff won’t take kindly to sudden changes of direction. BPOs in particular are starting to get wise to this, and are focusing on keeping their employees engaged. A motivated and valued employee is better able to “go with the flow”—a key component to scaling operations.
Learn more in this article about some top BPO trends in 2024 and beyond.
3. Regulatory requirements
While these aren’t necessarily complicated problems to work out, they add another layer of complexity to the scaling process whether the resource is tech or people. The nature of cloud computing and virtualization of servers means that data could be residing anywhere, and organizations need to do their homework to make sure they’re not running afoul of their requirements.
Read more about how BPO’s can ensure data privacy in intelligent document processing.
4. Workload spikes
Intelligent document processing services built to scale
At ScaleHub, our flexible intelligent document processing service relies on a mix of OCR, AI, and the largest network of 24/7 global IDP crowd contributors to transform information stuck in documents into indexable, addressable data at any scale.
We use software to break document images down into discrete bits that our AI digitizes before being securely error-checked by the crowd. An increase in workload just means a bigger crowd—which we’re able to offer instantaneously on-demand—no new hires or training required. Because it’s a service, there’s no software to install (and, without software, there’s no need for hardware) and you can start distributing document volumes in days, not weeks.
- ScaleHub customer Community Brands has a Financial Aid division for families seeking tuition assistance at private K-12 schools. Once a year, their application deadline necessitates a spike in processing needs. With ScaleHub, Community Brands was not only able to handle this increase in document processing without bringing on any new staff, but also increased the speed of capturing these documents, from two weeks down to two days.
- NOVENTI, another ScaleHub customer, is the leading billing and software company for Germany’s healthcare industry. With the number of data fields to be processed increasing by as much as 2,500% in the span of a few days—and spikes like this occurring a couple of times each month—it’s nearly impossible for any team to handle the workload efficiently. Our highly scalable, GDPR-compliant and ISO-certified managed service gives NOVENTI the flexibility to handle these increases without disruption, nor the cost of adding temporary staff.
Seamlessly scale intelligent document processing
BPOs are getting called out by name here, but any organization that has tedious data entry processes—and wild fluctuations in inbound document volume—will benefit from attending.
Watch our recent webinar to learn how ScaleHub can help you effortlessly scale document processing.
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