Hyland automation capabilities

Process automation benefits

Although automation technologies abound, many organizations find it difficult to advance their automation initiatives beyond a few initial use cases. Not only do business processes continue to evolve, but all the new technologies and vendors entering this space also make selection challenging. Luckily, your organization’s automation strategy does not have to be determined for the entire enterprise all at once. Starting small and then gradually expanding is a valid approach to automation, and the rewards of undertaking this journey are well worth it.

Here are just some of the benefits modern process automation solutions can provide:

• Improved process efficiency: Automation decreases the amount of effort required by the process.


• Decreased costs: Automation technology can dramatically reduce the direct and indirect costs of the process.


• Decreased business cycle time: Automated processes can perform faster than manual ones, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing exceptions.


• Improved data accuracy: Automation makes processes more consistent, leading to fewer errors.


• Greater opportunity for innovation: Automation frees employees from menial tasks, giving them time and a technology platform for further innovation.


• Process improvement: Automated processes are easier to monitor and analyze, providing opportunity for systematic process improvement.


• Improved regulatory compliance: Automation makes processes easier to audit and standardizes process execution, leading to reduced opportunity for policy violations.


• Improved information security: Automating processes involving secure or confidential information reduces human involvement, which in turn reduces the risk of accidental or intentional data breach.

The future of automation in the workplace

A recent study conducted by Forrester and commissioned by Hyland asked technology decision-makers about the top benefits realized or anticipated from intelligent automation initiatives. Respondents indicated optimism that their efforts would pay off:

Business process automation improves the movement of information inside and outside of your organization, making tasks more efficient and decisions more informed. This level of improvement can be applied throughout the information lifecycle, starting at the very beginning: Capture.

Automating document capture and processing

Many business processes begin when information enters your organization. Whether it is an email, an invoice, a transcript or another type of document, it needs to be accurately captured and processed. Investing in effective automation at this entry point not only speeds up document onboarding but can also create significant benefits downstream, improving information availability and findability, and even data security and compliance. Here are a few critical capabilities to consider at this stage:

Optical character recognition (OCR)

Advanced AI-enabled character recognition engines accurately identify information in scanned documents or image files to enable document classification and data extraction.

Document classification and separation

Scanned or imported documents are automatically categorized by document types, and packets of multiple documents are automatically separated into individual documents for further processing.

Data extraction and validation

AI-powered data processing engines locate and extract relevant data from scanned or imported documents and can even match and validate extracted data against other enterprise systems or data sources.

Machine learning (ML)

Machine learning technologies automate improvements in the effectiveness and speed of many aspects of document capture and processing, from character recognition and data extraction to validation.

Generative AI

Applying generative AI during document capture and processing can provide an additional layer of information, such as automatically generated document summaries and a deeper analysis of document content and metadata.

Systems integration

Extracted or imported data is automatically sent to the relevant systems and workflows, freeing your staff from manual copying and pasting.

Intelligent document processing (IDP)

Want all the cutting-edge document capture and processing capabilities in one platform? Hyland IDP provides industry-leading AI-powered document capture, classification, separation and data extraction in a single, low-code platform that makes automation design, deployment, and management easy and accessible. And with its continuously learning AI engine, Hyland IDP improves on its own, increasing accuracy and efficiency and reducing the need for human intervention.

Hyland’s commitment to continued innovation

Hyland continues to innovate and improve our capture and processing solutions. Why do we put so much R&D effort into this set of capabilities? Because effective capture and processing of documents is not just about effective capture and processing. It is also a prerequisite for many downstream business processes:

• Information availability and findability: Properly classifying and indexing documents and extracting accurate and relevant data ensure your users can find and access the information they need to do their jobs.


• Data security and compliance: Proper recognition, separation and classification of documents are a prerequisite for effective data access controls and group security policies; for the required regulatory and legal activities like auditing, eDiscovery and legal holds; and also for secure information lifecycle management practices like retention, archival and deletion policies.


• Artificial intelligence: The old technology quip “garbage in, garbage out” applies hundred-fold when it comes to AI. Whether you are investing in generative AI or other ML and analytics capabilities, you won’t get far without clean, accurately classified and indexed data.

Automating business tasks

After information is captured or imported, it typically needs to be acted upon. Here, too, effective automation can help speed up processes, reduce bottlenecks, and improve user and customer experiences. This is where effective document capture, classification and data extraction really pay off: They make automating other business tasks much easier and more effective.

• Content sharing and routing — Automatically direct relevant content to the right workflows or people for review, signature, approval and other business tasks.


• Productivity features — Give your users the right tools to manage their workloads with automated queue management, alerts, reminders and insights.


• Case management — Streamline management of the various records, tasks and activities pertaining to cases and other complex information-driven processes. Automation helps standardize complex processes, leading to better process efficiency, accuracy and compliance.


• Search automation — Save and share search queries and receive automated search alerts when new content matching your query is available.


• Automated content enrichment — Using the power of generative AI as well as retrieval-augmented generation, users are empowered with prompt-based information discovery and on-demand content analytics and insights.


• Workflow automation — Use an intuitive drag-and-drop workflow designer and business logic to automate and optimize manual tasks and data flows.


• Integration capabilities — Seamlessly connect disparate systems and applications, facilitating the smooth flow of data and processes across your organization. Hyland solutions can leverage out-of-the-box connectors and REST APIs to integrate popular collaboration tools and synchronize data between systems.


• Robotic process automation (RPA) — RPA software like Hyland RPA offers an end-to-end platform that enables your team to intuitively analyze and document business processes, design automations and manage bots.


• Orchestration tools like Hyland Automate and Hyland IDP — Low-code, user-friendly automation and business process model and notation (BPMN) process designer functions to develop content-rich process applications.


• Auditing automation — Automated processes are easier to audit, thanks to the digital system logs that track every system action. Providing auditors and regulators with external access to predefined reports further reduces disruption to your team.


• Reporting and insights — Automated processes generate a wealth of datapoints about your process performance and user activity. Enabling your users and administrators with self-service reporting dashboards can provide them with a more complete view of their work and with helpful insights for process improvement.

Automating content lifecycle management

Automation can also help you effectively manage information across your enterprise, improving information security and findability, as well as reducing costs and risk.

Security automation

Effective content classification enables automatic assignment of correct user access controls and group policies, ensuring the right information is visible to the right users and reducing risk of accidental or intentional exposure.

Federation

Automate access to and governance over information spread throughout the enterprise, including business systems, file shares and legacy content repositories, without requiring users to log in to and search each location.

Retention automation

Meet complex compliance requirements by automating all retention tasks including transfer to storage, legal holds, archival and deletion.

Redaction

Automatically redact private or confidential information in document types based on business rules, or dynamically mask sensitive information in files depending on the security level of the user.

E-discovery support

Effortlessly find relevant content across multiple systems in the organization and automatically apply legal holds.

Automating application building

Automation can do more than improve how your organization processes and manages content. It can also help you improve and innovate your user and customer experiences by building better, more intelligent content solutions. By combining the technologies mentioned above with some degree of application development automation, organizations can significantly improve competitiveness and accelerate time to value while reducing costs and errors.

Rapid application development (RAD)

Platforms optimized for RAD automate many aspects of application building and deployment, from code generation and integration to deployment, testing and logging. They also usually offer intuitive, low-code interfaces to make application development more accessible to nontechnical users.

Low-code design

Low-code platforms offer simple visual design tools and drag-and-drop configurators to automate complex coding tasks and accelerate application building.

AI-supported development

Generative AI can automate many aspects of application development from code generation to documentation, optimization and prototyping.

Automated cloud deployment

When it comes to the cloud, automated deployment standardizes your organization’s cloud infrastructure, reducing infrastructure costs and enhancing its security and resilience.