When we started our IDP business, our assumption was that cost savings would be the main driver for purchasing decisions -- in other words, how we can help our customers save 30–50 percent on data processing costs. But the last six years have taught us those cost savings are the number two priority for most companies looking for IDP solutions. Our customers have taught us that the number one thing is being able to effectively scale their operations. Today, data processing is heavily dependent on manual labor. We've worked with customers who were worried about their business picking up more volume because they just did not have the capacity to handle that increase.

According to Statista, the total enterprise data volume will double by 2022 worldwide, reaching more than 2 petabytes. And about 80% of this data will be unstructured (think: email, imaging, and other data that cannot be analyzed as is). Undeniably valuable sources of insight, the ever-growing volumes of unstructured data present a problem, though: handling it is less than rewarding for the human workforce. So, how do enterprises make the data they have drive real business value, and how do they do it without overburdening the employees? Intelligent document processing, or IDP for short, might be an answer.

Traditional document processing units required staff members to manually read and key in relevant information from purchase orders, quotes, invoices, remittances and other documents – every day, year after year. This process lowers both staff morale and productivity, and often leads to unwanted errors and increased costs. Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a next-generation approach that uses automation to quickly extract information from business documents. Here are 10 things you need to know about IDP and how it can enable end-to-end process automation for your organization. The first wave of IDP was driven by template-based optical character recognition (OCR) technology.