Business leaders know that data is as precious as currency and success relies in being able to realise value from the information and insights buried within it.
The challenge that organisations face is that 80% of the data that they gather is not structured and therefore not in a format that their systems can understand without significant manual effort.
Automation seeks to reduce or eliminate manual effort and technologies such as workflow and RPA are now leveraging OCR to extract key data from semi-structured documents such as invoices, sales orders and forms into the structured format they need to automate processing.
The structure of data can be described on a spectrum - the more unstructured it is the greater the level of manual effort required to handle it. Structured and semi-structured data are machine generated, by far the most complex data that an organisation must handle is unstructured because it is human generated. It's the enquiries, complaints, claims and correspondence that flow in every day from customers, suppliers and employees that are not only unstructured but descriptive, unpredictable, in multiple languages and received through different channels.
