Johannesburg, 01 Dec 2022
SPI, the African distributor for utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry and the southern African reseller for Esker, a leader in document process automation solutions, today announced the issuance of US patent number 11494551 by the US Patent and Trademark Office for Esker’s Document Coding Prediction technology.
Spanning both the order-to-cash (O2C) and procure-to-pay (P2P) cycles, Esker Synergy AI is built into the solutions to vastly reduce repetitive and low-value tasks. Manually entering data for invoices and other documents is time-consuming and often leads to accounting errors. Esker’s Predictive Coding feature addresses this problem by utilising a powerful set of AI technologies to automatically match data from existing records.
Having focused its investment strategy on how AI technology can enhance business process automation for over 10 years, Esker has engaged in extensive research on deep convolutional neural networks. As an example, the newly patented predictive coding feature can anticipate GL account, cost centre and tax code/rate assignments on incoming invoices. The “brain” embedded in Esker’s solutions identifies data from similar existing documents and recommends detected information to complete the data-insertion process. The suggested action can then be either approved or rejected. Esker Synergy AI allows customers to benefit from high recognition rates from day one.
Esker’s efforts to build new AI capabilities such as auto-coding, e-mail triage, improved document recognition as well as anomaly and fraud detection have resulted in solutions that streamline business processes and empower employees. “It is often challenging to obtain AI patents because it is increasingly difficult to apply traditional patent approval rules to machine and deep learning inventions,” commented Jean-Jacques Bérard, Vice-President of Research and Development at Esker. “However, since Esker packages the algorithms into dynamic and comprehensive solutions that manage and analyse both structured and unstructured data to create efficient, simplified business processes, we are continuing to be successful in obtaining patents.”
“The fact that Esker Synergy AI makes use of the best of human intelligence and cutting-edge AI technology represents our approach to product development: the technology is not there to replace but to augment the work humans do, thereby making it more efficient and engaging,” added Jean-Michel Bérard, CEO at Esker. “The benefits of this symbiosis are experienced by the entire business ecosystem – from the customer to the employees to the planet – creating positive-sum growth.”
For further information, please contact Chris Anderson at tel: (+27) 11 234 1560; fax (+27) 11 234 1387; e-mail chris@spi.co.za.
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SPI
SPI is a company that provides utility software products and services to the Open Systems segment of the IT industry. It is the sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based Innovative Routines; USA-based Help/Systems; USA-based Linoma Software; France-based Esker; and; UK-based OpusVL (ex Xi Software). SPI also develops some of its own software utilities to complement the overseas products that it distributes.
SPI has a wide and varied customer base and includes organisations such as Aspen Pharmacare, Johannesburg Municipality, University of Johannesburg, MMI Holdings, Nampak, National Brands, Stellenbosch University and UNISA.