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It’s no secret that workers were thrust into WFH with little to no preparation these past two years. There are a variety of different platforms that companies and vendors employ to accelerate the processing of invoices and other documents, and these platforms have softened the impact of transitioning to “remote.” Meanwhile, the focus on digitization and smart technology that many industries have started looking at for their back office and support departments have required workers to keep on top of it all, while completing other projects and tasks at the same time. With that in mind, how should businesses adapt to the modern remote worker’s digital environment?
Staple helps businesses remain agile by automating data entry from a variety of platforms, including direct upload, email, online data storage cloud solutions, and even social media. Staple’s adaptability extends not just to the infinite type of documents it can process using its templateless approach to data capture, but also the method that you can upload those documents, and subsequently the output format for integration into existing business processes. This automation of back office support functions makes remote work much easier on you and your business.
As of June 2021, a COVID-19 tracker by YouGov, an international research and data analytics group, has found that approximately 41% of Singaporeans have had to stay home from their offices, the number rising above that in India, Malaysia, and Thailand. It’s clear that the pandemic has forced businesses to shift to remote work, and the fluidity of the situation has left returning to physical spaces an uncertain future.
However, even in the midst of ambiguity, industry leaders have considered the option of making work-from-home (or, as we all know it, WFH) a permanent option, due to the ability to attract talent from a multitude of different locations and potential cost benefits in real estate, travel and infrastructure. A report from Deloitte last year estimated that 50 million people in Southeast Asia are expected to make the shift to remote work full-time: Singapore (45%) and Malaysia (26%) are in the lead with a substantial potential remote workforce; Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam are following closely behind.
With that in mind, who are the people most affected by this change? The same report has found financial services & real estate as the most affected industries. Breaking the corporate megalith down, the departments seeing the most outsourcing to remote work are back office support and enablement offices such as HR, administration, legal, IT, and security. Support, management and enablement roles in these departments are highlighted as key, given the advancement of technologies and the trend of hyperautomation that supports these roles. Robotic process automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have become commonplace in tech-savvy offices for intelligent business process management. This trend is not unexpected; changing customer preferences and a younger, tech-savvy workforce have prioritized the need to shift manual labor tasks such as task mining and data entry to automation so that people can work on the things that matter.
In theory: most businesses have made the shift to digital and the majority of business transactions are done online. Data entry doesn’t take much time, because the process of data extraction has been simplified. Data analytics has never been easier, and this data can drastically enhance business decision making.
In practice: many businesses still send and receive physical mail, receipts and invoices, all of which need to be digitized. This is exacerbated in Asia, where not all businesses and offices across different regions have the same access to or culture around technology. Documents can come in the form of scanned images, and all that unstructured data needs to be extracted and entered into a structured format for immediate use or integration into another system or APIs. Data entry remains the most time-consuming process of the data analytics pipeline for most businesses, and inaccuracies and human errors are harder to track with so many people working remotely.
In theory: safe business communications are done through a centralized structure with security features, and information is disseminated in an organized way to everyone who needs to receive it at the same time.
In practice: we have been using all sorts of communication platforms in remote work, sometimes too many to keep track of. You could send an email to a colleague, while they respond to you using MS Teams, while yet another colleague starts a thread on Slack regarding the same project. The same is true for the receipt of documentation for businesses; documentation can arrive through your company’s private cloud storage solution pipeline or through your company email, and for startups, online cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox, or even messaging apps such as Whatsapp and Wechat. The plethora of platforms and human users in data entry make data security practices complex to implement.
In theory: digitizing manual processes like data entry is extremely complex and new, and it can be very overwhelming to ask workers to adapt to it, especially since it’s hard to train people while telecommuting.
In practice: while the shift from manual data entry seems new, that’s actually a myth. For over twenty years, optical character recognition (OCR) software has been used to process images into machine-readable text for use in data entry. Think about how libraries have been using this software to digitize physical copies of books to e-books. However, traditional OCR has its limitations, since it can only process documents from a limited number of specified templates, and it can’t discriminate between necessary and unnecessary information on a document. This becomes relevant in a business setting, where line items in invoices can span multiple pages of a document, and formatting is unique to each vendor.
Given the need for safe and secure data management for businesses and organizations, there’s a large benefit to centralizing documentation inputs for data entry into one platform for data extraction and internal document creation, instead of many human users. While uploading these documents can be done through direct upload, a smart solution would be to automate documentation queues through the various platforms your company employs. The data entry software you use should be flexible enough to extract data from all types of documents without the issue of having to create templates for each one. It should also allow for direct machine to machine integration.
Staple is a next generation software that utilizes deep learning and AI along with computer vision technology to extract structured data from documents. With Staple’s proprietary machine learning technology, no template is needed to begin data extraction. Staple allows direct upload of documents, and automated input through a variety of platforms like email, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Whatsapp.
Once the data extraction process starts, users can access Staple’s API through an intuitive GUI that highlights key information for capture from document samples. A point-and-click editing tool allows you to customize the information you need and self-corrects using AI to maximize data capture accuracy. The extracted data can be formatted as an Excel, JSON, txt or xml file, or directly accessed for machine to machine communication via Xero, Quickbooks or SAP Concur integration. Staple’s team of engineers can also tailor our API for your company’s specific needs and practices, including direct integration with your company’s intelligent business process management system. We offer accuracy, flexibility and security in data entry, making remote work less stressful, smarter, and easier for you and your business.