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deepakd0005
deepakd0005
April 18, 2022
Solved

IDP vs Document Extraction Smart Services

  • April 18, 2022
  • 15 replies
  • 0 views

Hello,

Recently I was provided with a requirement to extract certain data from PDF documents. The PDF documents should be extracted from a common mailbox and then few data available within the documents will have to be extracted automatically and stored in a database table. The whole process should be automated and there should not be any manual activity present within this process apart from reconciliations if any. 

After going through the documentation, I came across the inbuilt application IDP and the basic Document Extraction smart services which can perform the data extraction task. As IDP requires some manual activity, I prefer document extraction services as a better option for this requirement.

Can use Appian RPA to automate the steps required in using IDP to achieve this functionality ? Is this a better option than using the smart services ? Please suggest the best way of achieving this requirement. 

Best answer by stefanhelzle0001

IDP is a whole solution, while the smart service is only a smart service. And that smart service is meant to be used on IDP only. I do not recommend to use it isolated.

15 replies

richardm900458
richardm900458
April 18, 2022

Hello Deepak,
to simplify this a bit:
RPA is meant to execute tasks in the system like you configured it in advance, not to develop or customize features or functionality.
RPA, IDP or a plain basic appian process needs to be set up at first.
-> so would not recommend to use RPA to train or customize the IDP set up.
And it is not quite true that IDP requires a manual action every time.
You have to train the IDP AI in the first couple of dozens/hundreds of documents, but after that, if the document structures stays basically the same, the rate of recognition is increasing and no further manual steps should ne required if the process is set up properly.

Kind regards,
Richard

deepakd0005
deepakd0005Author
April 19, 2022

Thanks for the response Richard. 

As far as I understand, for IDP to extract details from a document, they will have to be manually uploaded to the system. I meant automating these steps using Appian RPA, so that the document will get uploaded to system for data extraction.

I assume the core logic behind IDP and document extraction smart services is the same. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Apart from this, there are other activities which needs to be performed post data extraction, like extract certain pdf pages, merge pdf, email pdf, etc. 

If the core extraction logic behind IDP and document extraction smart services are same and the above activities can be performed directly from the process level, would it be wise to stick with document extraction smart services instead of using IDP ?

Regards,
Deepak
stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
Brainy
April 19, 2022

The functionality is NOT the same. Document extraction does just read the text content from a PDF. IDP does OCR, classification and field-by-field extraction.

The idea of IDP is to embed it into your own process. Check the documentation on how to do that.

rohithc3325
rohithc3325
August 16, 2022

In the start doc extraction documentation . how can we add the value Appian or google to the vendor process variable .

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