The Business Process Automation (BPA) market is growing exponentially with a wide variety of solutions and services available to organisations. Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is increasingly becoming the solution of choice for many organisations because of its ability to streamline and deliver efficiencies to end-to-end processes such as accounts, sales, customer correspondence and claims. In fact, many publications and analysts have noted 2020 as the breakthrough year for IPA. A recent report conducted by advisory firm KPMG found that half of organisations have deployed or are piloting some form of IPA  and only 20 – 30 per cent of businesses were not considering IPA to be a crucial part of their strategy in the coming years.

IPA is defined as an evolution of Digital Process Automation (DPA) and is more widely used for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).  Instead of simply using rules-based decision making as per a DPA application, which relies upon structured data, IPA solutions implement approaches such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Intelligent OCR to additionally eliminate tasks within a process that normally rely upon a human’s intelligence. In the world of document processing these tasks include understanding meaning and intent, validation, verification, performing further actions such as customer email responses and handling exceptions.