Boost Your Bots: How Cognitive Capture Makes RPA Data Extraction Consistent

Cognitive capture powers up robotic process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI) that extracts document data through context rather than rules. This gives you a virtual workforce that needs little maintenance while providing you with easily accessible data and actionable insights. Whether you’re just starting to look into RPA solutions, or already have one up and running and are looking for ways to optimize it, you’re about to discover how cognitive data can improve the effectiveness of your robot workers.

You can now access technology that automates document processing. RPA solutions blaze through repetitive rules-based processes; cognitive data capture software reads documents like a human and extracts data with little to no human intervention. Working together, these two technologies can take over the costly error-prone chore of manual data entry with minimal human intervention.

RPA Lets Humans Do Human Work

RPA takes over repetitive manual business processes from human employees. Software bots run through a series of instructions, or rules, to execute each task that makes up a process. Being virtual machines, they never make mistakes and they always deliver on time. These bots do exactly what they’re told, when they’re told, 24/7/365. They don’t get sick or take vacations when you need them most.

With the right setup, RPA helps save your company a substantial amount of time, money, and resources. They can also relieve your employees of manual back-office tasks while empowering them to manage value-generating activities. 

RPA Makes Light Work of Manual Tasks

Your RPA’s superpower is its ability to handle high-volume document processing workflows. Once the bots have been trained to execute specific tasks and keystrokes, you’ve got yourself a hyper-efficient virtual team that takes care of previously manual processes, allowing employees to get on with higher priority work.

You can also have your RPA trained to multitask; for example, in addition to document data capture, the bots can also export data to multiple systems across your organization simultaneously.

Most RPA solutions are easy to integrate into your existing IT infrastructure, ensuring that workflows continue to run without interruption. Once your RPA provider and your IT team have set up rules for the processes you want to automate, you should be able to basically let your robots run in the background.

When you’ve configured your RPA to process a high volume of documents with variable formats, however, the set-it-and-forget it approach simply won’t work.

Vanilla RPA Needs Constant Tweaking to Capture Data

Regardless of the type of document you’re processing, a bot with no cognitive component needs specific rules to know where to find specific data. For example, when processing invoices, you need to tell the bots where to find the data you want to extract, and the format of that data. However, not everyone puts their invoice data in the same location, and not everyone uses the same format for data points.

To ensure your RPA captures data accurately on its own, programmers need to set up rules for each task that makes up the process. This means it needs separate rules for each invoice layout. To get a better idea of just how dependent RPA solutions are on rules, let’s see how it extracts totals from three different invoices with the same set of rules:

As you can see, when your RPA runs into variables it hasn’t been programmed to handle, it will either move on to subsequent tasks or simply stop running. 

So while bots can be trained to handle basic manual steps when processing documents, they lack the ability to understand variable layouts and numerical formats on their own. Humans must create rules for them to capture data accurately. The work required to maintain your RPA’s document processing capabilities can create an unnecessary demand for internal resources and budget.

Cognitive Capture Makes Your RPA Smart

You can integrate a cognitive capture solution into your RPA so your bots can run through their operations with little to no human intervention or rule maintenance. This will save you the time, trouble, and cost of creating new rules for every new document layout you want your RPA to process.

Unlike a traditional image-to-text optical character recognition (OCR) approach to data capture, Rossum locates data visually. It does not identify data points based on the text it reads; instead, its neural networks skim-read documents to understand their layouts while focusing on key locations that contain the data you want your RPA to extract.

In practice, this means you do not need to hardcode specific layouts in your RPA workflow anymore – you can rely on an existing AI-based service to capture the right data effortlessly. On occasions where the cognitive capture component makes mistakes, simple corrections enable it to learn by itself.

Rossum Can Power Up Your RPA Initiatives

Rossum handles manual tasks for digital workers the same way it does for human workers – right out of the box, with no template setup. To start automating end-to-end document processing, you can integrate its cognitive capture technology into your RPA in as little as 15 minutes. 

Employees can easily train Rossum to understand new invoice formats, increasing Rossum’s accuracy over time. So the months required for creating, testing, and maintaining dynamic data extraction rules can be spent increasing your RPA’s efficiency and effectiveness, while simultaneously increasing employee productivity. In fact, Rossum can achieve over 95% accuracy in just one month of regular usage.

How Rossum Fits Into RPA Workflows

When you integrate Rossum into your RPA, your document processing workflow will look like this:

Note that initially this process requires at least one human operator to validate extraction results before the RPA exports data to business systems like your ERP and accounting software. Rossum’s intuitive UI keeps validation quick and simple, especially when compared to rule creation and manual data entry. Human verification also trains the platform’s neural networks to capture data more accurately with use, helping you achieve fully automated end-to-end document processing.

Rossum Is Ready to Work With Your Robots

Cognitive data capture can boost the efficiency of your RPA dramatically. It enables your virtual workforce to fully automate document processing in the long run, eliminating the need for new rule creation for new variants of the same document types.

While Rossum’s generic AI engine is trained to process invoices, its dedicated AI engine enables it to extract data quickly and accurately from several other document types, including, but not limited to:

• Bills of lading
• Sales orders
• Order confirmations
• Inventory lists
• Shipping documents
• Insurance claims
• Loan applications

Whatever your document data extraction needs, Rossum’s cognitive capture can handle it. You can try Rossum yourself right now. Simply set up your trial and process up to 300 documents every month, free of charge.