Breweries can decrease paperwork and increase productivity and data with an Intelligent document processing platform

Intelligent document processing. What is it and why is it critical to a craft brewery? Let’s start with that first question: We’ll define intelligent document processing as a cloud-based platform that captures, processes, manages and archives a brewery’s most important business documents (think employee paperwork to vendor invoices). Gone are a zillion Excel sheets or, worse, paper documents and manual processes for organizing and storing important documentation and data. Why is this critical for today’s fast moving craft brewery? Let’s take New Belgium Brewing Co. as an example.

The famous legacy craft brewery implemented an intelligent document processing platform called KnowledgeLake a few years ago (see the video above). As New Belgium Brewing steadily expanded its operations, you can imagine the volume of critical documents moving through the business. The brewery had traditionally relied on paper documents, and in some cases, employees had to rifle through filing cabinets, storage boxes and stacks of paper for necessary info each month. Does that sound familiar?

To optimize productivity, New Belgium Brewing and KnowledgeLake experts worked together to re-evaluate processes involving a variety of departments, including finance, accounting, environmental health and safety, human resources and legal departments. Within months, the cost to process a document dropped 69 percent from $3.58 per document to $1.11. The company’s average annual return on investment is 430 percent, which equates to a total savings of $1,092,028 over three years.

There’s also cool machine learning involved here.

The KnowledgeLake Platform’s machine learning technology helped reduce the brewery’s invoice processing time from 38 seconds to 10 seconds in the first two weeks of deployment, and 85 percent of their invoices are now processed straight through. These accounts payable/receivable workflows have resulted in faster approvals and payments to vendors and distributors, expediting a formerly time-consuming, business-critical process.

How does all this work?

With KnowledgeLake, every document gets automatically identified with machine learning, so data can quickly be routed to all the right people and stored in the right places. The platform sees digital documents as well as paper. It can extract PDFs, DOCs and other files directly from an email client. Machine learning allows for faster, more accurate extractions, and AI slashes the time spent training on the platform.  KnowledgeLake adds easy workflows for review\approval and automating data entry into systems.

Here’s a quote from Tye Eyden, collaboration analyst at New Belgium Brewery

“Before KnowledgeLake we were lucky if we could get 5-10% of our invoices into Dynamics without manual intervention, and we were hoping to get to 80%. But now we’re getting almost 100% of our invoices into the system without manual intervention.”

The KnowledgeLake platform intelligently automates critical and repetitive high-touch business processes and unifies workflow and data entry across business applications, which is critical for enterprises with strict information governance requirements like brewing. To learn more, visit right here.