How to Glean Actionable Insights from Your Business Documents in Real-Time

Extracting meaningful information from data – also known as data extraction – has become a critical trend that can give you a competitive advantage in the market.

If you've been processing large amounts of contracts, for example, using a contract analytics tool can help you obtain valuable insights without necessarily spending too much time and other resources.

Given the tremendous rise and advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, the adoption of data processing software and analytics tools is now readily available and no longer optional for savvy businesses. 

But did you know you can digitize and also glean actionable insights from your paper documents, files, and records in real-time, as well?

Draw Insights from Paper Documents

Traditionally, companies use paper documents to prepare contracts, invoices, agreements, and various other files. While the adoption of e-Doc solutions is accelerating, many companies still follow the traditional route – mainly for compliance reasons and to meet external standards.

But, in physical paper forms, contracts and other documents are less easy to manage and draw insights from than with digital copies of the documents. So, to keep up with the times and make it easy to manage your documents, you need to find a way to convert them to digital formats.

Digitizing your documents streamlines the management, analysis, safe-keeping, and sharing process, which enhances efficiency. It also delivers multiple other benefits like reduced costs, increased security, and improved productivity to name a few.

Let’s say, for example, you want to digitize all your business contracts for better management, analysis, and the possibility of drawing patterns and insights from the documents. You can gather all the documents you want to digitize and use a scanner to scan and store them in digital form, or scan with a mobile app to protect and safely store your files in digital form.

However, if you are looking for a better way to not only digitize your contracts, but also analyze and draw meaningful insights from the documents, then you'll need to opt for more advanced software solutions, such as use a specialized contract analysis software to help in this regard.

Advanced Document Digitization and Analytics

A contract analysis software is designed to not only digitize your documents, but also extract relevant information specifically from a contract document.

Here is how it works:

1. Convert Paper Documents to Digital Format

First, if the document is in paper format, the software converts it to digital format. In other words, it copies and makes the paper document editable in digital form.

How does it do that? The software uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to reproduce the paper document in digital format.

OCR is designed to recognize letters, words, and characters in paper documents and convert them to a digital version. So if it spots an "R," it will reproduce the same in a Word or .TXT file.

The accuracy of the conversion depends on how good the OCR software is. From your end, it's best you scan the documents as clearly as possible so it’s easier for OCR to recognize letters.

2. Understand the Data with Machine Learning Models

OCR tools are generally suitable for simple documents. But they often fail to understand the more complex terms such as those used in a serious document like a corporate agreement.

To address this shortcoming, the digitizing tool or contract analysis software you use needs to make use of advanced ML models. These models can detect data at a more accurate level.

The models might or might not be pre-trained. If the models are pre-trained, then they wouldn't need to be fine-tuned to recognize characters. The accuracy will be at the peak from the get-go.

In case they aren't, you'd have to spend some time training the models and fine-tuning them to your desired specification before they can reach the desired accuracy level.

3. AI Makes Things Even Better

Artificial Intelligence takes accuracy to the next level.

As you process more and more documents using a specialized document or contract analysis software, the in-built AI feature learns and adapts accordingly.

You'll reach a point when the accuracy of your software is near 100%. And then, you can make adjustments to glean actionable insights from the contracts in real-time.

You can glean definitions, terms, clauses, costs, periods, penalties, violations, among other things with a greater degree of accuracy using your AI-powered contract analysis software.

Eventually, you’ll be able to automate the process of reviewing contracts within your company.

Adopt More Efficient Document Workflows for Business Transformation

In conclusion, to transform your business into a modern, more efficient, paper-free, and greener organization, pivot away from paper and adopt better document-processing workflows.

That entails adopting a workflow that ensures your business documents are digitized, safely stored, and accurately analyzed to inform your decisions, strategies, and operations.

You can achieve digitization of business docs using appropriate tools in four basic steps:

i. Extract data

ii. Understand

iii. Clean

iv. Transform

Start with extracting the text using OCR, understanding it using ML and NLP (Natural Language Processing), cleaning it to make the data error-free using AI, and lastly, transform your workflow with insights gleaned. An analytics tool will accelerate this transformation process.