BGL clients save 130k document processing hours with AWS AI

Melbourne-based financial management software vendor BGL has leveraged Amazon Web Services artificial intelligence to help users of its SmartDocs 360 platform save 130,000 collective hours in document processing time.

Launched in 2020, SmartDocs 360 helps over 200,000 customers automate the data extraction, categorisation and interpretation of documents required for financial investment reporting.

BGL said that prior to SmartDocs 360, its customers relied on manual data entry to extract and categorise documents for financial investment reporting. 

Deployed on AWS, SmartDocs 360 leverages Amazon's Textract machine learning service that automatically extracts printed text, handwriting and data from any document.

BGL said that SmartDocs 360 automates about 80 per cent of processing work from scanned documents, saving its customers over 130,000 collective man-hours since the platform's release in 2020.

Customers have cut document processing costs by 80 per cent and reduced the average processing time by 75 per cent, from 2 hours to 30 minutes, the company said.

The volume of processed files has also increased six-fold from 685,000 in 2021 to 4.3 million in 2022.

SmartDocs 360’s backend uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to deploy its containerised applications - without BGL needing to install, operate and maintain its own Kubernetes environment.

BGL also leverages AWS Lambda to execute code and automate response requests at scale, and in 2022, used Amazon's ML service SageMaker to create a developer edition of SmartDocs 360.

The solution allows developers to build customised document extraction and classification solutions by training their own AI models.

“With AWS, we now have the scalability we need to address customer demands and grow our business to new markets, all in a secure, cost-effective package,” BGL's chief executive Daniel Tramontana said.

"Amazon SageMaker in particular, has been instrumental in the development of BGL SmartDocs 360 – Developer, which will create a brand-new revenue stream for us."