Data extraction has become increasingly important as the quantity of semi and unstructured data has grown dramatically. Since structured data is machine-readable, it can be analyzed and processed more precisely than other data types.
Companies can use data extraction automation tools to extract information from many sources. Businesses may save resources by automating data extraction. They can also eliminate manual errors, enhance data-driven decision-making procedures, and relieve employees of mind-numbing routine tasks.
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What is Data Extraction?
Converting semi or unstructured data into structured data is known as data extraction. Structured data gives businesses valuable insights that may be used for analytics and reporting. Data extraction aids in the consolidation, processing, and refinement of data to be stored in a centralized area for analysis and documentation.
Data Extraction Automation: A necessity for every business
The following are the top benefits of data extraction automation for organizations:
- Making Better Decisions: Users can extract useful data from unstructured data sources via data extraction.
- Savings: Manual methods are expensive. A Fortune 500 company is expected to process numerous invoices just for accounts payable. These are invoices from smaller vendors that the company gets outside its Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system.
- Reduced manual errors: By automating the data extraction procedure, the structured data obtained will contain fewer errors, resulting in more accurate business reports. Data extraction automation, according to Irislink, may prevent 80% of such errors by giving more accurate data.
- More efficient processes: Data entering by hand takes longer and is more prone to errors. Companies would save time by not having to re-enter data, and they would be able to extract data quicker due to auto-extracting data.
- Employee motivation: Data extraction technology would relieve employees of this tedious and repeated manual process, allowing them to focus on their primary responsibilities. This also helps them be more efficient and productive by eliminating distractions.
Advantages of data extraction automation for various industries
Companies can use data extraction to import data from files, credentials, and photos into their systems. Let’s look at a few data extraction use cases in various industries:
Real estate investors examine past sales data for certain properties and then compare these to similar properties on several characteristics to determine the investment potential. Before comparing, most property managers gather historical data from multiple document kinds and categorize it in a standardized manner. On the other hand, manual extraction is prone to a variety of errors, leading to inaccurate data sets and estimates.
Advantages of Automation:
- Automated data extraction helps expedite sales comparisons by extracting past sales data from various non-standard property documents.
- Standard fields like property, building, and adjustment data can be easily extracted.
Logistics service providers manually feed updates to the TMS or ERP by extracting and analyzing large amounts of data from bills of ladings, invoices, and other documents. Commodity merchants, food producers, shippers, and logistics companies must process hundreds of Bills of Lading every day. This method is subject to errors and delays because it is carried out manually.
Advantages of Data extraction Automation:
- Bills of lading and other logistics papers are processed in real-time by automated data extraction technology, which ensures accuracy of over 99 percent.
- Process shipping information, purchase information, and any supplementary information for less money, faster time of processing, and error-free results.
You may find your desk or email inbox filled with applications for properties you handle as a property manager. It might be time-consuming to sift through all the documentation to find the main information that varies from application to application. Such credentials are extremely valuable, and the confidential material must be handled with extreme caution.
Advantages of Automation:
- Data extraction automation gives you the required information in a variety of forms, or you can use Sheets integrations to get the data you need.
- Data extraction software extracts variations across rental apps and sends them to where you need them.
A huge percentage of invoices are now sent in Pdf versions. However, because businesses issue and receive hundreds of invoices every day, automated accounts payable systems are necessary to relieve the burden of human entry and speed up, improve accuracy, and eliminate errors in the payable workflow system.
Advantages of Automation:
- The fine-grained data figures inside the digital bills are located and extracted using data extraction automation.
- If a company receives hundreds of invoices from numerous vendors, automated data extraction can help to streamline these bills in diverse forms and produce error-free reports.
Alternatives to Automated Data Extraction
The most generally available options are manual and template-based solutions for data extraction.
Companies can use template-based solutions to construct templates that capture data from files in a certain format. They rarely reach high automation rates due to the huge range of document types.
Manual processing has its drawbacks: it is time-consuming, costly, imprecise, and demotivating.
Conclusion – How can your firm achieve end-to-end data extraction automation?
The necessity to automating the process of data extraction is evident due to the availability of high-performance systems and the potential automation benefits. An initial data extraction project that yields significant results in a short period can persuade management to automate other operations, resulting in a significant improvement in the company’s productivity.
Starting with high-volume, complicated documents and the most advanced processing processes, where off-the-shelf solutions are available. The metrics to watch are the present cost of data extraction, the current cost of document processing at an advanced level, and the availability of data extraction options.
We have solutions for all of these categories at KlearStack.