This month the newspaper elEconomista has included in its central pages the supplement “Technology XXI“, which includes several companies with an innovative and disruptive technological proposal. Among them, it echoes the work that Serimag is doing in recent years to automate and accelerate business processes thanks to Artificial Intelligence.
Here you have the article, which you can also access through their website, by clicking here.
For over eight years, Serimag has been working with the most advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and putting into production automation solutions for its clients’ document processes, aimed at achieving their objectives.
What can AI offer in the field of automation and document processing?
Users and the market are demanding that companies automate their processes in order to be competitive and we believe that Artificial Intelligence is the only technology that allows the implementation of truly productive and reliable automatic systems. If robotization aims to imitate human behaviour, AI goes further by allowing the imitation of reasoning.
What outstanding advantages does it introduce in this field?
Technologies already exist, such as OCR or RPA, but the real world is much more complex than they allow. A first advantage over them is that there is no implicit rule-by-rule programming: the machine learns from previous experiences. It results in a system that is much easier to maintain. The second great advantage is that, thanks to that learning, it becomes robust to a greater number of scenarios and exceptions, which means achieving better automation ratios and with greater reliability.
On that basis, what solutions has Serimag created?
More than a product, Serimag offers a document processing service. Based on our knowledge of different technologies and accumulated experience, we create a solution tailored to the client: we sit down with them, understand their needs, reflect on the best way to tackle the problem, develop the solution and finally put it into production with constant online management. It is a whole document reengineering process in which we accompany the client from the beginning and while the service is underway.
In which sectors can this type of solution provide most value? What customer profile already trusts Serimag?
There are certain sectors, such as the banking and insurance sectors, which are great demands on document processes. Their business is based on operations, and these operations are based on documents. Increasing your benefits, whether economic or improvements in the user experience, is part of making these document processes more efficient. The country’s major financial institutions, Santander, BBVA and CaixaBank, have already placed their trust in us, and some have done so for more than eight years. Sectors such as telecommunications or utilities are perfect candidates to follow the same path.
Their business model is based on a pay-per-use..
More like a payment for success: we only invoice for what the system manages to automate correctly. On the one hand, we want the customer to link the costs to their own production, being aware that those operations rejected by the system will have to be referred to a manual operator and should not incur double costs. We intend to create a win-win relationship with the customer where more automation means greater mutual benefit.
Does more automation mean more benefit for the customer?
Undoubtedly, but let’s define benefit. The most obvious is the economic one, where we typically achieve reductions of up to 50%, although that is not usually what our customers are most concerned about. Others, like the time factor, where we transform batch processes to online processes, are critical. There are even regulatory and normative compliance issues for which this type of technology is a lever that makes it possible to address these problems or not.
What objectives has Serimag set itself in its proposal to companies in Spain?
We can say, without fear of being mistaken, that today we are one of the benchmarks in Spain for digital back office services. But there is still a long way to go, as transforming the core processes of large corporations is not trivial. We want to strengthen our position in the sectors we already operate in, but also to open up new markets. And not only in Spain, but also internationally, as in Portugal, where we are already established.
The Digital Transformation of companies is not only based on placing pieces of technology in their processes, but also to make a change of mentality towards the digital. The end user has already made that change. The traditional process must be reinvented to adapt and automation is a fundamental part. Serimag wants to be the ally of companies in this change, both because of the potential of our technology and our service proposal.
How will you continue to work in the future to bring innovation and efficiency to document processes?
R&D is part of our DNA. In fact, this whole project was born from a research group at the universities. With them, together with important research centres such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center or the Computer Vision Center, we continue to work together to continue evolving our technology, both for future projects and for current projects already in production. New types of neural networks, better understanding of complex and unstructured documents, more efficient forms and higher computational performance… There are several fronts open to us.
