The future will be different. It will be because of change that it is different. Those changes are called “unpredictable” and “unknowable”. That is why those who happen to get it right are so richly rewarded. They inspire names like “soothsayer” and “prophet”. They are legends, with names that ring through history like Nostradamus and Moses.
If only we could know the future!
Document management and process management are about to change. For good. Again.
Today’s landscape is far more advanced than most people realize. Here’s what we saw walking through a production center today.
We watched an operator page through a handwritten scientific journal that had been scanned on one of the book scanners. The journal was beautifully illustrated with colored pen, cut outs and notes, tables and headers. They had just finished running it through a system that can read handwritten information.
The operator ran their mouse over the image of the page on the screen and words leapt out from the page in shades of yellow and green. To the left of the page a text file moved in unison with the mouse on the right, highlighting the same words that appear on the page, with the correct capitalization and punctuation. The machine knew how to read this document! It didn’t know what it was reading, but like a child who knows the alphabet and how to sound out words, it could identify the words and the letters correctly. It could read handwritten script in scientific nomenclature!
That was today.
Meanwhile, in a different part of the office…. They are sending scanned images to an AI reading machine that can read a document and understand the relationship between pairs of values on the page. If it sees the words “Invoice Number” and a string of numbers next to it, it intuitively knows that it’s seeing a pair of values that it will return back to the user. Those pairs are extremely powerful. Consider that with this ability, any form that contains fields that are filled in can be read and the results returned without any further set up. Any business process that requires a form or any time you are collecting information on paper, this technology, without any training or set up, returns the pairs of values on the page that it finds. That’s pretty wild.
That was also today.
Over in the invoice processing department, we saw an invoice returned from a different AI engine. One that’s learned how to read tables of information. Tables are surprisingly hard to automate capture for. We won’t go into why, but trust us, it’s hard. This system takes any table it sees and breaks it into rows and columns of data. It can tell headers from results and give you instantly what took hours to produce manually. And, like the AI machines described above, it’s really good at its job.
That was today.
Most people aren’t aware of the power of these tools. Why? They aren’t really readily usable out of the box. Sure, you can send a document to the cloud and get results pretty quickly. But how do you scale that to process 10,000 documents a day? The fact is, those tools are the future of our industry.
Unless you are Amazon or Microsoft, or a handful of other multi billion dollar companies, it’s unlikely you are going to beat them in the development of tools that can read documents, identify tables, or read handwritten notes. But fortunately for our industry, we can leverage these abilities at scale, using systems that supported our industry before AI ever existed, but also in combination with those AI capabilities. Very soon, you can do what no one else can.
These new AI abilities still require something to manage them. All of the activities that fall outside of the pure AI capture engines need to run smoothly to feed this artificial intelligence. How can we be nimble in our ability to select just the right AI tool to read a document or take other actions on a document when that technology is constantly evolving and improving? How can we compete in developing document processing tools that are better at reading documents than these multi billion dollar companies? I say, you don’t have to beat them.
That’s where PACE comes in. In 2023, we launched a product that has never existed before. A system that combines the people and process management power of the past 20 years of development. While also having the cloud based artificial intelligence tools available from companies like Amazon and Microsoft to deliver zero touch or near zero touch services to your customers at a price and accuracy that you’ve never dreamed of!
PACE was built because we believe work can be better. PACE makes your organization better while leveraging the most powerful AI tools available on the planet to support your customers.
Do you believe that if your employees work on what they are best at, they perform better? Is that how you assign every task that your employees perform? It’s how PACE assigns tasks. That’s right, PACE looks at every available employee and optimizes their work assignments based on what they are best at. Automatically.
What is PACE?
It’s a system that objectively measures the performance of your employees around a set of meaningful core values. PACE stands for Performance, Accuracy, Commitment and Engagement. Our system measures these key performance indicators automatically and produces scores that you can use to determine employee performance.
By doing that, you eliminate subjectivity in the process of evaluating employee performance. That makes your company better to work at, because it’s a fair place to work.
Do you know exactly what each step in your business process is costing you for each client? PACE does! With our Profit with Task Detail report, you can break down your projects task by task and see how your jobs are performing from a cost and revenue perspective.
Being able to quickly see how your jobs are performing allows you to make course corrections when needed and BEFORE the problems are too big or too far along to easily fix. Heeding off problems before they become unmanageable makes your company better.
Can your customers use a secure self service web based portal to check the status of their work? Customers can create shipments, check on work status, and securely upload and download documents, which is great for fulfilling customer requests securely.
The future of our industry is PACE. We’ve combined the most powerful AI in the world with decades of people management experience specifically for the purpose of making your document management service business better for everyone. Better for you, for your employees and for your customers! Find out more at www.knowyourpace.com.