How to choose the right IDP solution

Intelligent document processing (IDP) has evolved quickly in the past few years. It surpasses the capabilities of traditional capture, which relies on optical character recognition (OCR) for content recognition and instead uses AI to process and understand documents. As AI has expanded its presence, it has evolved alongside IDP to bring new values such as intelligent autoclassification and extraction from semistructured and unstructured formats.

The vendor pool for IDP solution providers has also expanded. Market intelligence firm Infosource notes its field of vendor analysis has more than doubled in less than 10 years, with its latest Global Capture & IDP Software Vendor Matrix Report covering 20 top IDP providers.

When sourcing IDP solutions, it can be difficult to know how to evaluate the vendors. Firstly, it’s important to consider how IDP can address your specific organizational needs and whether it has the right functionalities to support them.

How might your organization decide which IDP solution is most suited to your specific needs? The selection criteria below can be used to judge the suitability of an IDP solution.

12 questions for IDP vendors

1. How accurate is the IDP solution?

Most IDP solutions have an accuracy rate ranging from 80-99%. Ask the vendor how accurate the solution’s AI-powered engine is when extracting, classifying and verifying complex document types, including structured and unstructured formats.

2. Does it work with multiple files, documents and language types?

It’s critical for an IDP solution to have the ability to automatically identify and separate complex documents and ensure the correct data is extracted from each, regardless of the document type or language.

> Learn more | What can you do with Hyland IDP?

3. Can it clean and enrich data it ingests?

The ability to perform image cleanup functions like line straightening, removing lines and dot shading, or enhancing characters is key. Your IDP solution should go beyond simple extraction. The ideal solution should be able to validate the extracted data against a system of record to make sure it is accurate. Content enrichment capabilities may also be beneficial if your business process would benefit from additional metadata or AI-generated contextual insights, summaries and recommendations. information.

4. Is it user-friendly?

An intuitive no-code or low-code interface that empowers business users to design and deploy new automations without the need for highly technical coding or AI expertise is key to democratizing digitalization. The solution should have an intuitive, web-based user interface that’s easy to use and integrates seamlessly with existing business applications. Newer solutions even offer chat-based design and deployment tools powered by GenAI.

5. Is it versatile?

With so many possible use cases for IDP across your organization's departments, having a different platform and vendor for each one would quickly become unmanageable. The right platform will be able to easily extend across all the use cases you need with scalable, tailored solutions for each use case that can be managed from one central orchestration console.

> Read more | What makes an organization a good candidate for Hyland IDP?

6. Does it harness the power of AI?

The top IDP vendors will use AI in their solutions to add value where your organization really needs it.

Be sure to understand the extent of its AI-based capabilities, as well as its limitations and how effectively it can incorporate human input. Older solutions may use machine learning (ML) models instead of LLMs, which means that in order to become more accurate, the models may require considerable training to learn where key information is located (such as in images, tables, documents, bar codes, etc.).

Modern IDP solutions instead use gen AI’s LLMs to recognize, extract and understand data in the documents without the need for initial training. This drastically accelerates automation setup and time to value, eliminating the burden of manual processing and data entry, as well as quickly making the extracted data available to the processes and people across your organization.

7. How do IDP and gen AI work together?

Gen AI lets you better understand your documents and helps you retrieve accurate answers based on your enterprise content through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Gen AI fills information gaps by generating missing metadata. It can also create new metadata fields from user prompts or questions in natural language. This enables you to better understand documents and helps you retrieve accurate answers based on your enterprise content.

8. What are the solution’s data governance and security policies?

Information governance and data security should be among your highest priority items. Ensure the IDP solution has robust data logging and structured document retention policies in place for compliance and auditing purposes. Role-based permission controls for various business groups within your organization should be present. And IDP data logging is essential for security risk assessment, compliance and auditing purposes. In the AI age, the ability to log and retain records, enforce structured data retention policies, support information governance and minimize legal risk, is essential.

9. Do you have access to technical support?

Your IDP vendor should provide access to comprehensive technical training, an online learning platform and expert support as and when required.

10. Does it possess advanced analytics capabilities?

Access to key process metrics and performance indicators, as well as metrics that highlight the accuracy and performance of the IDP solution itself, are essential. The ability to view comprehensive analytics is crucial, as it allows you to make better-informed decisions, optimize processes and ensure the efficacy of their digital transformation initiatives.

11. What are its application integration capabilities?

Exceptional IDP solutions offer a wide range of out-of-the-box functionality, including prebuilt connectors, enabling you to expand your IDP solution to meet increasingly complex business requirements, seamlessly working with other enterprise applications to create an optimal user experience.

IDP and cloud solutions

Some of IDP’s momentum gain can be linked to the increased processing power of the cloud, Infosource notes. Though capture and IDP has traditionally been delivered on-premises, cloud-based delivery has consistently increased for the past decade, according to Infosource’s report. However, you should evaluate your IDP vendor for what you need—whether that’s IDP for a private cloud, public cloud or on-premises. The right vendor can meet you where you are.

12. Does it possess expanded automation capabilities?

Integrating IDP into your operations is not just a step toward automation; it’s a leap toward a more data-intelligent future. Features such as integrated process automation, advanced AI-driven data extraction and a highly scalable, low-code architecture accelerate deployment and expansion.

Your IDP solution should offer a portfolio of complementary products, such as case management, workflow, intelligent automation or robotic process automation (RPA), to support your automation and digitalization programs.

Hyland IDP is an advanced IDP solution that provides document capture and processing automation, AI-driven document classification and intelligent data extraction.

In addition to the reasons Hyland customers choose to partner with us for enterprise content solutions, Hyland IDP comes with its own differentiators. For example:

1. AI-powered processing: Hyland IDP leverages leading LLM technologies to provide exceptional document recognition, separation, classification and data extraction.

2. User experience: With a gen AI, prompt-based interface, intelligent suggestions and low-code configuration and integration, Hyland IDP is easy to set up and use.

3. Document AI: As part of Hyland Content Innovation Cloud™, Hyland IDP provides access to advanced content intelligence to enhance business processes.

4. Fast deployment: Hyland IDP provides faster implementation and realizes faster time to ROI than less modern IDP solutions.

5. Additional connectivity to high-powered tools: Hyland IDP supports additional Hyland and third-party AI and RPA services.

6. Web interface: Hyland IDP has a web interface that speeds up and simplifies automation configuration and management.

Are you ready to explore the world of intelligent document processing with Hyland? Chat with Hyland about IDP.

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