UiPath Document Understanding – A Game Changer?

Companies around the world are realizing the need for automating digital tasks through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) faster than expected. The global robotic process automation market was valued at USD 7.11 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow at an impressive rate of 23.4% annually in the current decade. An important RPA use case, and one of the fastest growing is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).

What is Intelligent Document Processing

Intelligent Document Processing is the capability of collecting, generating, and/or interpreting documents, which allows organizations to free up resources from the manual and time-consuming work of processing digital documents manually. Intelligent Document Processing allows Bots to analyze documents and take actions based on their understanding of the documents.

There is an inherent challenge with Document Processing – as much as 90 percent of enterprise documents tend to be unstructured. To tackle this challenge, RPA solution providers empower their solutions with cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning technologies like Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning through neural networks.

UiPath’s Document Understanding

UiPath’s Document Understanding solution is an AI-driven technology that is developed to help read and process documents automatically with the help of software robots. Enabling AI technology makes the process intelligent because of which robots are able to identify and locate data even if the type or format of the document changes.

The solution follows a similar logical flow as the manual processing of documents –

Defining and loading taxonomy – This defines the structure and the fields that we need to extract in all the different types of documents that the process expects
Digitize – Converting the input image/pdf file into a digital format using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine
Classify the input file into one of the types defined in the Taxonomy
Extract – the data from the input document
Export – Finally the document is exported for further use.

Source: UiPath

UiPath encourages the use of Machine Learning Models for the Classify and Extract stages. UiPath has allowed the use of ML Models in 3 different ways –

Using pre-trained ML models for frequent documents like invoices, passports, IDs, bills, purchase orders, etc. which have been trained on thousands of documents from different geographies and which can be used directly in the RPA process.
Using ML models by training them on user-provided documents. These help the models learn specific use cases.
Uploading and using custom ML models created for hyper-specific use cases. UiPath provides assistance in creating these custom ML models as well.

Advantages

Faster Processing
A large U.S. members-only wholesale retailer has leveraged Document Understanding for processing invoices, and it claims that the invoices are now processed in 30 seconds which earlier used to take 3-5 minutes. Learn More
Free-up Resources
Evros Technology group which used Document Understanding to process purchase invoices claims that it has achieved an 80% improvement in time savings, which resources use for more productive work . Learn More
Get Better Insights
Chevron leverages Document Processing to extract critical data from drilling and completion reports, which makes it available for analysis almost immediately through a Microsoft Power BI Dashboard. Learn More
Easy Set-up
Fisher Scientific’s Document Understanding Process for automated payment processing took around 12 weeks to set up. Learn More
Cost-Savings
An AI-enabled Document Understanding process that is helping a clinic process patient data to predict high-risk pregnancy rates and enroll patients to appropriate programs, is saving the clinic $11 million annually.

UiPath Innovations around Document Understanding

UiPath’s AI Center (formerly AI Fabric) allows for the deployment and management of Machine Learning models. Custom Models can also be deployed on AI Center. These models can be retrained with customer data and used in the Machine Learning processes.

UiPath has launched the RPA Framework for Document Understanding in UiPath Studio. This contains the logical flow implemented with built-in logging, exception handling, and retry mechanisms – making Document Understanding projects easy to get started. The framework also contains the architecture for Attended as well as Unattended implementations and also has integrated support for Human-in-the-loop processes for easy manual validations

Out-of-the-box Pre-trained Machine Learning Packages are retrainable ML packages that reduce the overhead of creating extraction and classification models from scratch. These can be retrained with customer-specific data as well as customized with additional fields or expanded to support Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek languages

UiPath has announced the release of a new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) specifically for Chinese, Korean and Japanese Languages, thus virtually expanding the Document Understanding capabilities to documents in these languages

UiPath has recently launched Digitization Service – which is a set of REST APIs that allow for the digitization of image or PDF documents and offers support to multiple OCRs. These APIs enable access to parts of the Document Understanding framework in projects designed in other languages such as Java or Python (which may not even include RPA workflows).

Moving forward with the idea of making Document Understanding easier to use with minimal changes, UiPath has launched a public document classification endpoint that is pre-trained for 10 document types including receipts, invoices, purchase orders, utility bills, passports, ID cards, Remittance Advices, Delivery Notes, W2, and W9. Using this public endpoint, a document can be classified into one of the 10 types without having to create or retrain any Machine Learning model

In August 2022, UiPath acquired Re:infer, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) company for unstructured documents and communication. This acquisition is aimed at automating the interpretation of unstructured documents like emails and chats, thus helping potentially boost the Document Understanding services to incorporate unstructured documents

Get Started with the Experts

TSP was the first partner globally to have achieved the UiPath Services Network (USN) certification for Document Understanding. In the past 2 years, we have helped several clients achieve their automation objectives through Document Understanding. We have helped our clients in automating their payment processes, redact sensitive information for compliance purposes, and extract information from various forms and IDs for meeting company policy requirements.

In this course, we have experimented with multiple OCRs and also successfully delivered projects using the Digitization Service. We now have a good handle on multiple pre-trained Machine Learning Models and have also used the public classification endpoint for a time-sensitive project.

TSP is committed to helping our customers envision a fully automated enterprise and reach their automation goals by providing them with the latest UiPath Innovations and automation expertise.

Nishant Banka

UiPath Certified Advanced RPA Developer | Hyperhack’22 Winner

An experienced software engineer with a history of working in the cross-industry environments, on new-age technologies like RPA, Spring Boot, Chef, and MongoDB.

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