Data Extraction Unchained: Automation That Will Finally Ease Your Work

• Digital Factory
• Article

Prefer listening? Hear the article in audio format.

All those thousands of partners, customers and suppliers… Thanks to EDI, they’re now conveniently integrated into your ERP system, but you still get quite a few PDFs over email whose data you must copy by hand. Extraction of data from documents such as invoices, orders and delivery notes is among the foundational processes for a functioning business. Yet paradoxically, you’ll often encounter a wealth of mistakes caused by the diversity of business document formats or bad data transcription. 

The existing methods for automated data extraction are demanding to develop, and they have to be adapted to every change to a PDF document’s layout. Meanwhile, this area is ideal for integrating artificial intelligence, which will quickly eliminate all these troubles. Just how much can it accomplish?

What’s the limit for document layouts? Infinity.

No matter if you’re copying customer data by hand or extracting it with OCR and a fixed set of document-layout templates that must never change, artificial intelligence is nothing you need to fear. As it works based on language models, the document’s visual appearance doesn’t actually matter. Artificial intelligence is able to extract data no matter how your document is structured. This type of extraction is becoming an important part of the Aimtec Integration Platform, in which we validate the extracted data and cross-check it with the master data from the ERP. That means you needn’t worry about one threat frequently connected with AI – the risk of errors and the absence of human control.

“With AI we’re able to process even document formats we’re seeing for the very first time. There’s no need to create new templates, the customer doesn’t have to inform us that anything has changed. So the number of layouts for invoices or other documents doesn’t matter,” explains Lukáš Rampa, who is in charge of the research and development team for Aimtec Integration Platform.

Fewer mistakes, greater efficiency. What’s the way to go?

Master data management remains a major challenge. If, for example, the ERP system lacks an entry for the business partner that provided the PDF document, errors may occur. Here the customer truly does have to deal with the problem; this is beyond AI’s abilities for now.

“The cost reduction brought by AI can be truly substantial. Customers don’t have to spend hours copying data manually. This both eases their work and eliminates the risk of errors. The time saved can be channelled into vitally needed upkeep of master data and further system development,” notes Aimtec Integration Solutions Director Karel Sladký.

The rise of AI is reflected today in practically every enterprise. Its integration into existing key processes can rid you of many unnecessary errors and save you surprising amounts of time and expenses. Meanwhile, this is also an easy way of “jumping into” a new trend that will see swift developments. In this respect too, you can rely on Aimtec as a partner that brings you timely deployments in the places where it truly makes sense and the use of AI is a real benefit for your company, not just a completed innovation-checklist task.

Share article