Artificial Intelligence & Document Management Systems

Document Management Systems (DMS) to help in day to day work; Instead of adding work

If I have an hour, I will spend it on making another sales call to top up my sales numbers, reduce the number of to-do flags in my Outlook mailbox or just go the pantry for some networking. Yup, Definitely not filing my documents into a Document Management System.

But this mindset can change if DMS can help with my actual work. If it can actually make my life easier. With the upgrades made to DMS over the years, There is already improvements in these areas of actually making the day to day tasks of workers easier. And not adding another task of filing documents digitally to the ever-growing task list.

One of the examples of upgrades which we are grateful for is the ability of DMS to support digital forms and approval flow. Take for example: Request for Approval of Asset Purchase. Prompt and succinct online forms powered by DMS template guides users to fill out the key information. Once completed, the system does preliminary checks on the fields to reduce errors. The DMS then plays the role of a diligent office courier to route the request to the correct approving supervisors. From one level to the next. Once the team leaders approved it will be automatically routed to the Directors. At all times we can see who is the bottleneck preventing holding the hold process back. When all is said and done, the forms as well as the supporting documents are automatically filled to the relevant folders within the company for future reference.

Added abilities with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning

The above example of Work Flow is just the tip of the iceberg of what a DMS can do to directly benefit a user. Creating a win-win situation where the DMS gets to record and achieve the documents it needs and the users experiencing lower workloads. A DMS with AI baked into it can do much more.

Classification and Processing

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, the DMS can learn to find patterns from repeated exposures to the documents. AI can learn how a human handle or file each type of document pattern within the organization. Example: the AI can identify invoices by recognising invoice numbers, keywords, field labels and dates. Then file them automatically to the respective folders and trigger alerts to the relevant personal to carry out the processing.

The DMS can even extract the information on all the invoices and consolidate them into a spreadsheet to track processing and payment status. With these in place, archiving of invoices and payments will no longer be an afterthought by the first port of call.

Helping Humans with decision making

Document clustering is the process where documents are grouped into topics with prior set up by humans. Documents are grouped by patterns of dates, keywords, authors, sources, etc or a combination of these. Then linked up together like a mind map for humans to make sense of. Without it may take a human a long time to go through every document thoroughly to get the patterns. An important function when we have to deal with a treasure trove of information spread over a massive landfill of documents. Following closely is the function of data analytics where the DMS can carry out some basic predictive and data visualisation.

Data Security

With the firming up of standards by the Europe GDPR and Singapore PDPR; organisations and workers are on heightened alert to ensure that documents are processed according to the new stringent standards. There is always a nagging concern that some documents or process flows that involves Personal Identifying Information (PII) may not be accounted for. With AI built into DMS, we can now get the DMS to carpet crawl through all documents and flag out documents that contains Personal Identifying Information (PII) and give them the proper secure handling. With this, the DMS can also help ensure that no there are no stray sensitive documents are left in unsecured folders. Only authorised personnel are given access to these documents based on the security clearance level. Audit trails are also in place knowing who has seen or amended these documents. The added help of an AI to help me scan all my documents to ensure that I have not left any documents that contain PII laying around is a good reason enough for me to diligently file my documents into an AI-powered DMS.