2023/11/07 | Written By: Lucy Park 

(This is the first blog post of our 'Digitize Anything!' series, where we dive into the world of digital assets and their value for businesses.)

At the heart of every business operation lies a mountain of paperwork. We're talking about the emails flying back and forth within your team, the presentations, the reports, and let's not forget the invoices, quotes, and receipts exchanged with clients and suppliers that seem to pile up daily. These documents are actually vital assets to your business.

For these documents to truly serve as assets, digitalization is key. By converting them into digital assets, not only can you boost your business's productivity, but you can also transform raw data into information that paves the way for digital transformation. In this blog, we'll explore what digital assetization entails, how it differs from digital transformation, and why it's an essential strategy for any business looking to thrive.

What is digitization?

Digitization is all about turning your paper documents into a format that's super easy for computers to handle. Think of it like teaching your computer to read all that paperwork using OCR (optical character recognition). Even if the paper is wrinkled or covered in shadows, OCR's got one big goal: to read those letters spot-on. And there's more – such as information extraction, where we can extract key details from any document you provide.

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Digitization and Digital transformation

By reading text accurately and processing it into a format that machines can easily handle, we can turn our organization's data into business value. This is the essence of the relationship between digitization and digital transformation.

Here are some examples of how businesses are creating value:

• An advertising agency reads text from images on online shopping mall product pages automatically. This helps them understand each product's features and generate ad copy on the fly.

• An insurance company finds key information in medical receipts and detailed billing statements, uploading it directly to a database without manual entry, and then creates a dashboard to display statistics about the recorded medications.

• A credit card company structures the contents of product brochures so that they can offer customers an explanation bot powered by LLM.

What is the commonality you see in these examples? These examples demonstrate that although digitization alone may not contribute significantly to business value, it serves as a crucial stepping stone towards achieving digital transformation.

[Learn more about Document AI →]

Five Benefits of Digitization

1. Enhanced accessibility: Whether it's your organization or your clients, accessibility to data often suffers when data is stored in paper format or contains visual information in tables or figures. By turning that data into digital assets, you can index and make it searchable, making it easier to find and access the information you need.

2. Machine accessibility: Digital asset management isn't just about making data accessible to people. It also makes data accessible to machines, opening up a wide range of possibilities for data analysis and automation.

3. Automated document processing: By transforming data into digital assets, you can automate your organization's document processing workflows. Not only does this make the process more efficient, but it also increases the productivity of your workforce.

4. Secure data management: Digital assets not only make it easy for people to access data but also make it easy for you to manage and secure access to it. If you have sensitive data that needs to be managed with segregation of duty in mind, digital asset management can help keep it safe.

5. Foundation for digital innovation: By creating a comprehensive digital asset library, you're laying the groundwork for digital innovation. The ability to access, analyze, and leverage data in meaningful and valuable ways is the lifeblood of digital transformation and business success.

How to Achieving Digitization

Digitization is essential to digital transformation, but it's not always easy. Simply reading the words in a document doesn't make it a digital asset, as it still needs to be machine-readable and easy for machines to use.

Upstage offers a Document AI product to help you achieve digitization. Once a document has been scanned or photographed as an image, users can utilize the “Document OCR" service to read all the text from the image, and the “Key Information Extraction" service to pull key-values that are easy to load into a database. Also our “Layout Analysis” can detect document elements from any document including tables and figures. Use Upstage Document AI to accurately and sustainably manage your digital assets and make your digital transformation a success.