In today’s fast-paced world of business, using paper for record keeping and document processing can be counterproductive and may present a huge security risk that can create the potential for financial and reputational disaster. To avoid these pitfalls as well as to easily keep track of business records, it is crucial to use an automated and intelligent solution for securely collecting, processing, and archiving documents.
As the world’s first robotic digitization company, Ripcord is committed to delivering the simplest all-inclusive records management solution available on the market. With Ripcord, businesses can turn paper records trapped in warehouses into useful and meaningful data and make it accessible anywhere, at any time.
SourceForge had the chance to speak with Alex Fielding, the interim Chief Executive Officer at Ripcord, to talk about the advantages of using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in digitizing content. Fielding also shares his thoughts on the impact of robotics on job creation and shares some insights into the future of robotics.
Q: Please tell us a brief overview of Ripcord. When, where, and how did Ripcord get its start?
Alex Fielding, the interim Chief Executive Officer at Ripcord
A: Ripcord got its start in 2014 in the Bay Area with the goal to make a better mousetrap,
a robot using artificial intelligence and machine learning, to digitize and enrich the world’s paper and digital records.
Q: Who are Ripcord customers? What pain points does your solution address?
A: Our customers are businesses and government agencies that have paper and, not surprisingly, there are a lot of vertical industries that still have paper-intensive processes or backlogs of paper warehouses. They span across healthcare, financial and banking services, energy sector, legal, and others.
Q: If so much of the world is digitizing content, why is a service like Ripcord needed?
A: Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies have caught up to market initiatives for digital transformation, like big data analytics, automation of business processes, and integration with primary line-of-business applications. These cloud technologies act as “force multipliers” in improving the capture, categorization, and access to unstructured content to enable data-driven business processes.
The special sauce is in creating superior recognition and ML models to generate high confidence metadata in a structured taxonomy that can be easily consumed by various applications and users.
IDC estimates that only 1 percent of the world’s unstructured content has been analyzed. On top of that, Gartner predicts that the volume of data will grow 800% over the next five years, where 80% of that data will be completely unstructured. So Ripcord’s content enrichment value will continue to grow and add value in cataloging the world’s business documents to drive analytics, workflows, and line of business integrations.
Q: Ripcord is committed to enabling, enriching, and empowering robotic process automation (RPA) as a market. Can you explain what RPA is?
A: Much of the digital transformation initiatives are data-driven for better business outcomes. In the case of RPA, it uses the data from an application’s user interface (UI) to automate the process of copying and pasting data from one field of an application to another (screen scraping).
Ripcord enables this type of RPA by feeding the line of business application with high confidence data extracted from unstructured digital and paper records. Now that data is within the application, RPA can work with it to drive its (usually) attended automation.
Q: What are some real-world use cases for robotic process automation (RPA) in finance, retail, and manufacturing?
A: The common RPA use case for finance is invoice processing – automating the process of matching an invoice to its PO and goods received and doing reconciliation within the line of business application. Invoices and POs are forms that can be recognized and extract data for primary fields. This metadata is then fed into the LOB/ERP system and wa-la- data-driven RPA. Loan and credit applications are also ripe for data-driven automation as well in this market.
Retail would have similar needs for invoice processing, but we are also starting to see digitization and automation benefits for things like Proof of Delivery to employee onboarding.
Manufacturing can also benefit from enriching content to feed LOB applications and RPA for attended and unattended automation. Bill of ladings, bill of materials, packing slips, machine maintenance reports, and worker’s shifts all have content with information in them that needs to efficiently get into the primary LOB application. Digitizing and enriching these documents to automatically feed these applications increases efficiencies, lowers costs and time., and reduces errors.
In each of these cases, Ripcord is an enabler to the RPA and LOB application. In a data-driven world, we provide the data from your unstructured content with high confidence structured and enriched metadata. This same metadata not only can drive your automation initiatives but can also greatly help with analytics – feeding the data lakes with metadata from unstructured sources gives the analytics and decision support tools more data to feed off of.
Q: What are some challenges around robotic process automation? And how is Ripcord
addressing these?
A: We see the second coming of RPA using its unattended mode. Many of the low-hanging fruit of screen scrape copy/paste attended automation has been identified and implemented. The next phase will be a more direct interaction of data driving RPA’s unattended mode of automation. Our Auto-classification and ML extraction will drive this second wave with our high confidence enriched content metadata.
Q: What is your view on robotics and job creation?
A: Digital Transformation is here to stay. If you are not using technology to improve and stay competitive, then your company likely won’t survive. Automation is a big part of the digital transformation outcomes and RPA or “robots” are a key pillar to automation – so “robots” are here to stay as well. The new technologies that come with robots will create new job opportunities, probably higher value jobs at that. If you are not leveraging this new technology, your company and the jobs will go away with them.
Q: Any predictions robotics and AI in 2019 and beyond?
A: More of both and we plan to have one drive the other. There will be a higher need to trust your content and the data that is driving processes. This challenge will be harder and harder to do since the volume of content continues to skyrocket. “Content Catalogs” will also help solve these problems and maintain metadata of a content’s source, file, custom and sentiment attributes. Applications will interact with these catalogs as trusted sources for the content behind them.
About Ripcord
Ripcord is the world’s first robotic digitization company. Headquartered in Hayward, California, Ripcord aims to be the company that takes the world paperless. Creating a first of its kind robotic machine and software platform that streamlines records management, Ripcord empowers organizations across the world by helping them digitize records and make them accessible, anytime and anywhere.