Robotic Process Automation, or RPA for short, involves using robots to replace manual processes. It isn’t robots in factories, which is the blue collar work that is often what we think of when it comes to automation. This is automating repetitive and manual tasks in the white collar world, like receiving an invoice, extracting the data, and then entering that data into an accounting system.

Business documents come in a variety of formats, layouts and degrees of quality. This can include anything from PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, images and more. These files can contain handwriting, be low resolution, have skewed layouts and missing information which makes identifying and extracting key information a tedious and manual process.

According to Gartner, RPA is the fastest-growing segment of the enterprise software market and it is estimated that 85% of large and very large organisations will deploy some form of RPA. This prediction notwithstanding, enterprises are struggling to scale their RPA transformation projects out of the pilot phase.

Billions of documents, files, and data move between businesses, their customers, and systems each day. Whether it’s invoices, application forms, or contracts, these documents contain mission-critical information that must be correctly extracted and entered into a variety of enterprise systems.