It’s been a while since som3 last did an RPA piece, but we’re back with a bang, having teamed up with our resident UiPath contactors, Kamil Makowka and Alex Martinez. This time round we were shown one of UiPath’s latest offerings in the form of ‘Document Understanding’. Now, you’re probably thinking, well that sounds boring, I know I first did! However you’d be wrong. For such a simple idea, the complexity surrounding its ability to deliver is so vast, it’s actually too cool…OK…geeky, not to write about it 

So the concept of Document Understanding is simple, program a load of robots to intelligently assess, analyse and process the document that you have presented to your little robot family. But how is this different to other tasks that they do within the world of Automation, why is this so snazzy? Here’s why… 

Documents can be an utter nightmare to go through as a mere mortal possessing only a human brain. We as employees spend so much time deciphering these pieces of work and to make matters worse, they’re usually very varied! We break these documents into 3 categories:

• Structured – Things like forms, passports, driving licenses 
• Unstructured – Contracts, health records, emails 
• Semi-structured – Invoices, purchase orders and utility bills 

Now we as recruiters have to deal with a number of those listed items above and have definitely encountered issues with almost all of them. So spending so much time faffing about with this, when you’ve got multiple CV’s to get out the door, 3 deals to tie up, 10 MS Teams interviews to arrange and fix the microwave you broke at lunch, isn’t ideal. So this is where machine learning can help with the development of your robots’ artificial intelligence and gets them to read and learn about different document types and to study really hard! This way, they can help with things such as: 

• Varying templates 
• Awful handwriting – not a problem in the som3 office, we all have impeccable writing 
• Signatures 
• Check boxes 
• Skewed or rotated documents 
• Various file types/formats 
• Low quality scanned documents 

I mentioned before, you may think this is boring. But put your feet in the shoes of a business owner, who, now more than ever with a potential recession coming our way, is thinking about how tight to pull those purse strings. This simple notion of Document Understanding is rapid, accurate and importantly, saves costs! It mitigates human error, can avoid related losses and generally improves customer experience. It allows your employees to focus on higher valued tasks which are more worthwhile for the business and also that person. No longer will your staff have to worry about the mundane checking and double checking of certain documents. In the recruitment world, this is brilliant, as we’re constantly juggling ten things at once, and time is something we need to use wisely. 

As always, som3 are looking to speak to any RPA enthusiasts, whether that be client or candidate. We cover a whole range of RPA technologies, disciplines and roles so please feel free to check out our website (www.som-3recruitment.com/), get to know us a little more and give us a call/email. We look forward to hearing from you.