New Process Editor UI

The new design makes creating processes with no coding – no scripting – no configuration file editing as easy as it should be. Vinna 3.0 comes with the new BPMN process editor, with improved speed and usability. Now in Angular 10, all functions are componentized and can be integrated separately.

Plenty of new features improve the design and runtime management of processes. Cooperate better with your team members, as you write comments directly to activity instances. Work together designing the process. All activities can be configured through the UI – either through standard dialog or individual extended dialogs of activities, which can even bring up their own web UI. When a process is locked, you can now immediately see by whom. Besides many graphical changes, e.g. in the view of processes, document types and variables, it is now also possible to switch all views to lists and search in all trees and lists. You can see all environments where a process(-version) has been published to and we allow deletion only when no published version exists.

Vinna 3.0 Process Designer

Process Version Management

If you ever were in charge to manage a production system you know how important staging and versioning is. “Never touch a running system” is common but in the end leads to legacy problems as nothing can be updated any more. Key to any enterprise-critical production system is version management that allows full control over what is changed – of course with thorough testing in staging steps. Therefore, version management and staging is a central part of Vinna architecture from the start and has been further improved in version 3.0. You can now create major and minor versions (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, …) of processes. The latest version you edit is always marked as a draft version – you can’t break anything! Deploying a process happens for a certain selected version. So it is easy to work on major changes of a process and already test it but at the same time create hot fixes (patches) for existing production processes if necessary. And you can even change variables in each of your runtime environments separately for each version.

Vinna 3.0 Process Version Management

Environment Management

Environment ist the runtime system where a process is published to. Many environments – on premise, private cloud, public cloud – can be managed from the same Designer. The environment is executing the process by hosting and running the activities as necessary in as many Activity Servers as needed. In Vinna 3.0 we now have “transient” Activity Servers that auto-start with a VM or in a Docker, do their work and shut down again when not needed. Together with the separation of Activity Server configuration from the instance, you can easily assign arbitrary resources to a project to scale up dynamically in peak hours, or reduce hardware cost by using just as many servers as you need. An overview over all assigned activities and activity servers across an environment fulfills a long-requested requirement.

Process Monitor

The 3.0 runtime backend is fully compatible and introduces a lot of invisible changes related to scaling, performance and security. Process Monitor is the GUI to monitor the runtime and also has been completely redesigned. It comes with a lot of improvements and usability enhancements. Many visual usability enhancements were made with the new controls like grouping, filtering and customization of the UI for business operators. There is now a new tab for directly previewing documents in a work item with all their data. Licenses can now be reviewed and managed either in runtime or in design time with a common license view including status and report for click rates.

Vinna 3.0 Process Monitor with grouped work item list.

Vinna is an open and process-oriented platform, that allows users to define a process in exactly the way as it is optimally operated in a company. The design allows full flexibility in the data model with a hierarchical document model supporting batches, folders, documents and pages. The documents are processed as work-items in the flow and passed through activities. The activities are either standard tasks like OCR or Classification, or custom tasks as integrations into the platform. Any number of activities can be defined in the process as micro services, including arbitrary routing decisions based on intermediate results. The architecture of Vinna is service oriented (SOA) and the runtime is easily deployed either in the cloud (Microsoft Azure, AWS or private cloud), on premise or in mixed environments where the data storage is kept in house and processing happens outside.

All communication between services and databases is transaction based, securely encrypted and uses standard REST protocols over HTTP and HTTPS.  Three powerful HTML based graphical user interfaces are provided for defining, managing and monitoring processes. Vinna is available for small projects but also incorporates all enterprise features need for large production systems. The biggest Vinna customer now processes 100M documents p.a. in one system, which is 400.000 documents per day.

Whitepaper and data sheets are available if you are interested in further details, please contact us through info(at)skilja.com to obtain your copy.

Skilja has the expertise and the knowledge to make artificial intelligence, or as we prefer to say “cognitive automation”, really work. This is now proven in numerous projects that we and our valued partners and integrators have realized in the past.

At the same time every engine needs a chassis and wheels to be able to run. Last year therefore was also marked by the market introduction of our great, new, service-oriented and cloud enabled document processing platform “Vinna”. The first few dozens of projects have been delivered and customers are happy about stability, scalability and ease of deployment into system environments. Especially for enterprise deployment Vinna offers unique support for our customers. We will discuss the concepts of deployment and management of multiple tenants in environments and cloud in an upcoming post.

With the platform now readily available, solving the basic problems of process, storage, security, formats etc., our machine learning and intelligent algorithms can now even more easily be applied to real world tasks. Among others some examples of what we and our partners did in the last year:

• Claims management with automatic document separation and distribution of incoming e-Mail claims
• Digitizing complete archives of contracts for more transparency on their content
• Processing reports that then are inserted to an existing portal using robotic process automation (RPA)
• Automatic comparison of insurance terms in old contracts with the current terms to provide a suggestion for upgrading the contract or to detect legal loopholes
• Detection of duplicates, id-cards and photographs in incoming mail (scanned or e-Mail)

This is a small insight of what has happened and what is happening and we hope that also you, our readers, will not hesitate to reach out to make contact. We have a network of good partners worldwide and are happy to make the connection or we work directly together.

So what’s another year? – amazing what can be achieved in this time span… More is coming next months – stay tuned.

The goal was from the beginning to create a unique set of software solutions to solve the task of automatic document understanding using cognitive algorithmic methods. And we were using our experience from more than 20 years of creation of innovative software products, often pioneering and paving the way to new approaches, to achieve this goal and do it better once more. The current wave of so-called intelligent software and artifical intelligence, driven by the need for digitization of business processes came our way and is exactly where Skilja is positioned in and optimally equipped to deliver on the promises made by others. Because we have a fantastic team that knows what is needed and how it is done.

In the last five years Skilja has grown to a considerable size of now 15 very skilled engineers. All of them with long experience and knowledge in document processing or other key areas like neural networks, statistical machine learning and image processing. We have a great partner network that uses our software components and solutions so our team can fully and exclusively concentrate on developing the latest and greatest additions to cognitive intelligence that are needed to streamline processes. Skilja does not market too much of this publicly – we prefer to deliver. A few glimpses and examples of what has been achieved over the last years as description of real productive projects:

• Classification of incoming mail of one of the biggest insurance companies in Germany processing more than 100.000 documents per day with a supreme quality and unrivaled speed.
• Complete solution for claims processing in car insurance developed together with a leading BPO that processes and evaluates claims for more than 20 insurance companies in Germany.
• E-Mail classification of orders and complains of one of the larger online shopping platforms.
• Automatic classification and document structuring of medical records within life insurance applications for a big insurance company, leading to a significant speed-up of their processes for underwriting.
• Automation of car loan processing for a South-American bank using content based and ID-card classification to identify the necessary documents within a car loan and structure it – leading to a significant reduction of effort for checking a loan for validitity and completeness.News

All of these projects have been achieved by our partners and we are proud that we were able to help them to be successful and give them the competitive edge in these cases.

We are looking forward to the next 5 years, we are still innovating and still have a bag full of good ideas and projects that we enjoy working on in this time. See you in 2022!

Vinna was presented last week at the open house conference in Berlin that Skilja organized together with our dedicated partner ScaleHub (www.scalehub.com) with our partners TCG (www.tcgprocess.com) and Eucon (www.eucon.de).

Vinna Dimensions

The three dimensions of Vinna are:

• Process: Definition of flow of action define according to BPMN
• Documents: Richly structured and open model for storage and enrichment of documents and other media
• Activities: Process modules which are individually configured or created

Vinna is an open and process oriented platform, which defines a process in exactly the way as it is optimally operated in a company. If you wish you process documents in batches then create batches. If you want to work case or document centric then use these entities in the process. The design of the platform allows full flexibility with any number of activities to be carried out in the process, including arbitrary routing decisions based on intermediate results.

Vinna is based on a data and document model that is completely and transaction safe in a modern SQL database. Using a modular architecture of the communication layer Vinna can be scaled and distributed optimally. Processes with more than several 100.000 items per day are easily manageable with intelligent load balancing.

Of course the architecture is service oriented (SOA) and can be deployed at will in the cloud or on premise or in mixed environments. All communication between services and databases is transaction based, securely encrypted and uses standard protocols. The platform is multi-tenant capable, supports staging, versioning, assisted deployment and provides built in SLA monitoring of all processes.

Vinna Tools

As a part of the platform three powerful tools are provided with pure HTML GUI:

• Process Designer: Definition of processes and activity management according to BPMN
• Process Monitor: Operational view on running processes and SLA monitoring
• System Monitor: Technical view on running services and current state of the system messages, current throughput per service and activity

Vinna Modules

Vinna modules are activities in the process. The platform already comes with a number of standard activities included, like import, export, full-text OCR and PDF creation. Our own classification components and technology from selected third parties are provided as options. In addition individual activities can be created based on customer requirements or directly by the customers themselves using the open .NET API or the REST Interface.

Now already a tradition we just had the fifth meeting of Docville in Brussels this week. Docville is a networking & exchange initiative for executives from the international Information Management ecosystem (Capture, ECM, BPM, BI and BPO), organized and facilitated by Michael Ziegler. Docville now has more than 1100 members on LinkedIn. This group connects regularly to exchange their experiences on advances in technology and the trends in the market. This year Skilja for the first time was one of the sponsors of the event.

As usual the discussions, held at roundtables, were divided between market, marketing aspects and technical topics. For me – as a techie – the most relevant discussions were held around:

• SMART PROCESS APPS (SPA) AND INTELLIGENT BPMS (IBPMS)– ARE THEY REALLY THE SAVIOR FOR THE FUTURE?
• NEXT GENERATION DOCUMENT SERVICE BPOS- FROM BACK-FILE CONVERSION TO LUCRATIVE DOCUMENT PROCESS AUTOMATION
• AP AUTOMATION IN THE CLOUD –NOW THAT THIS IS A REALITY, WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES?
• MOVING FROM ON-PREMISE SOFTWARE TO CLOUD SERVICES: THE IMPACT ON THE IM-SOFTWARE VENDORS’ BUSINESS
• MOBILE APPS, DEVICES AND CONTENT IN A MOBILE WORK ENVIRONMENT
• THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCUMENT CAPTURE AND THE VALUE PROPOSITION
• AUTO-CLASSIFICATION DEMYSTIFIED OR THE END OF MANUAL INDEXING

As you can easily see the hot topics are (surprise!) mobile/cloud and document automation. The latter you might remember was also reflected in my recent post “Technology Everywhere” that featured a corresponding Gartner study.

Interestingly enough nobody was really interested in AP automation any more. In fact some of the participants actually didn’t even want to discuss it or use it as an example. Not because it is not big business opportunity – but because it is now self evident. It is clear that it can be done, how it is done and who is doing it. What a development over the last five years! Of course now everybody is looking for a similar opportunity to package a solution. The hot candidate is HR.

Especially the BPOs are looking for new opportunities to create new offerings for their customer and in general to convert themselves from scan services to real business process outsourcers. Everybody wants to go up the value chain. And with the maturing software this is possible – remains to convince the customers.

Auto-Classification and automation was discussed widely with a general agreement that we are entering main stream with this technology. After the pioneering years (starting 15 years ago) it is now generally accepted that human cognitive tasks can and should be automated. And not only in mailroom automation but in a variety of other areas where our software can take over the categorization and decision making. And it was agreed that this is best provided on a component level by specialized plugins from technology providers, so the vendors can focus on the actual solutions for their customers. Very similar to the way OCR has evolved just 10 years earlier.

Another interesting aspect was the discussion about cloud enablement. The acceptance of cloud services in Europe seems to be close to zero. Whether this is due to security concerns or fears of data loss nobody knows for sure. But you need to be cloud enabled as a vendor (checkbox feature) – even if nobody then buys it. The Nordic countries seem to be more willing to use the new offering. Also customers obviously still want to buy the software (CAPEX) instead of renting it (OPEX). Also surprising but came out as the result of a quick survey we did. This shows nicely how different the view of analysts can be from the actual reality. Although we all expect that the big move to the cloud can happen every day….

You can probably remember more than one event where the most valuable (and pleasant!) moments occurred during  conversations with other attendees during short coffee and lunch breaks, or post-schedule drinks. In these interactions sometimes the most valuable information and opinions are gained and exchanged. This is especially true for Docville where these conversations continued over good food and drinks until late in the night in the bar in Brussels.

It is a New Year and I want give all our great readers our best wishes for this year 2014!

Our small company, Skilja, is now going into its third year already – growing and doing well. Providing excellence in software and consulting is our goal and what we are continuing to strive for. Within two locations, in Germany and in Croatia (which is now in EU), we work hard everyday and with a lot of positive emotions and spirits to achieve this goal.

This blog has been quiet for a while due to my accident where I broke my right wrist. Meaning that I could pyhsically not write for a long while and then a lot of other tasks waited to be resolved. Now we will continue with the old routine to publish an article about classification, document understanding, cognition and related stuff about once a month. Look forward to the next contributions and stay with us!

For the start I am planning a small series about classification quality and how to measure it in different ways, which might be helpful for a lot of people working on classification projects.

Looking forward to see here,

Alexander

We are pleased to announce that Skilja has opened a subsidiary in Croatia. The office is located in the beautiful city of Novigrad/Cittanova in Istria which is in the North of Croatia and close to the Slovenian/Italian border. This location will be an engineering center and will allow us to do all the interesting things that we are planning and the projects we are working on. It is an inspiring location in a beautiful historical landscape with nice people and excellent experts. The pictures below show the location of the office close to the harbor. The address is:

Skilja GmbH Podružnica u Republici Hrvatskoj
Trg Poceto 19a
52466 NOVIGRAD

and we are happy to accommodate you if you happen to be around.

Also due to the growth we have moved to new offices in Germany and our new address is now in the center of Freiburg, which is also a very inspiring and nice place to work. The new address is:

Skilja GmbH
Kartäuserstr. 49
79102 FREIBURG

We are looking forward to more interesting projects and continuation of our success in the creation of document understanding solutions.

I’m just back from the international Docville meeting in Brussels. Docville is a community of professionals in the ECM and capture industry, organized and facilitated by Michael Ziegler which already has more than 800 members on LinkedIn. We connect regularly to exchange opinions, information and share trends. Or as his perfect motto expresses: Travel Once-Meet Many

This spring meeting in Brussels was again very valuable and provided many insights into technology and markets in this rapidly changing industry. As Michael puts it: Sharing ideas and learning valuable lessons from our peers in an environment of trust, respect and aligned interest is not only fun, it is mission-critical in today’s ultra-connected and rapidly changing world.

A lot of acquisition activity has been observed recently in this market: Lexmark buys Brainware, Readsoft buys foxray, Kofax buys Singularity and so on. Therefore it was a real highlight that the Docville community was able to receive a keynote on the topic presented by Christoph Löslein from Board Advisors AG. Christoph was cofounder of Dicom (which did a lot of acquisitions of which the largest and most successful was Kofax) and has specialized on consulting companies in this area since he left Dicom in 2004.

He presented reasons why integrations fail and I saw a lot of grins and nods in the audience as almost anybody has been through this once or many times when he showed the high level reasons why acquisitions fail:

•  A vision but no plan of integration: Wishful thinking.
• An integration plan, but no common vision and tangible synergies:  an 8‐lane highway leading to nowhere.
• Differences in culture no reconciliation of cultural differences
• Lack of communication internally

And the surprising number is that actually only 20% of all acquisitions turn out to be successful.

After this introduction we discussed in the now well-known and valued round table format topics of interest of the ECM market. At the round table there is one expert of the field who presents his insights and then leads an open discussion of 45 minutes to get the views of all participants and answers questions. There are technical, organizational and market round tables.

Some of the topics presented:

• From AP Invoice Processing to an Integrated P2P Approach- What are the Challenges and Opportunities?
• Changing Software Licensing & Delivery Models – Impact on Vendors and Customers
• From Scanning to Electronic Document Capture & Processing – Changing Platforms, Challenges & Solution Providers
• Document Service BPOs – what are the Global Trends that promise profitable growth?
• Is the Digital Mailroom having a Renaissance?
• SharePoint ECM: Leveraging Microsoft and Microsoft SharePoint Partners; Complementary or Competitive?
• What can Semantic technologies accomplish for Document Understanding and Document Management?

You can probably remember more than one event where the most valuable (and pleasant!) moments occurred during brief conversations with other attendees during short coffee and lunch breaks, or post-schedule drinks. These interactions might have led to subsequent collaboration and better business for you going forward if only you had more time to develop the conversation. This is especially true for Docville which continued until late in the night (or early morning) in the bars of surrounding quarters in Brussels.

Companies are very interested to understand what users – their customers – are saying. Today’s analytics tools try to measure quantitative data like number of followers for a brand, number of re-tweets and how often a product name is mentioned. Keyword search allows filtering out relevant contributions and even assigning a sentiment to posts. But the general agreement at the conference was that this provides only very limited insight. The real benefit is obtained of you also understand WHY a user is saying something about you. This can only be achieved with analyzing the unstructured text and hence document understanding.

In this area understanding goes under the name of text analytics. The goal is to integrate natural language processing (NLP) that provides a much deeper analysis of the social media content. NLP capabilities include syntactic and semantic parsing, named-entity recognition, relationship analysis and entity extraction. These methods are superior to traditional keyword and keyword list search in both matching relevant social media posts as well as in the accuracy for understanding the information in those posts.

We have seen some interesting presentations and discussions on these topics in the two days here:

Ian Hersey from  Attensity  gave a good overview on field.  We are talking Big Data with 300m tweets per day, 250b emails per day, 126m blogs, 800m Facebook users etc. If you have something to predict the predictive power is quite impressive and you can expect a 90% success rates for events (e.g. “American Idol”) if data volumes are sufficient. But successful business uses involve not just prediction but engagement like product feedback, direct customer service, marketing campaign effectiveness, and political outreach/mobilization. Equally or more important are the “whys” behind the predictions.

Ian also talked about the limitations of NLP known today like irony, sarcasm, “slanguage”, hidden agendas, cross-/multi-language issues.

Dana Jacob (former Yahoo) gave a nice insight in problems with spam and false brand engagement in social media data including the now famous tweet “Dear Yahoo, I have never heard anyone say, “I don’t know, let’s Yahoo it…” just saying…sincerely Google.” She made clear that 100% accuracy is not achievable in social media analysis – balance is important between research rigor and accuracy vs. limitation of human/machine analysis.

An interesting and concise case study was shown by Keith Paul from EMC who carries the nice title of a “Chief Listener”. EMC seems to be very advanced for a non-consumer product company with a corporate team of 11 persons to handle social media tightly integrating communities with 250k users on social sites. He could show some measurable successes in a business where sales cycles normally are 18 months instead of a few minutes in an online shop.

In a panel discussion on the second day the biggest arguments why real Document Understanding is necessary in Social Media Analytics were given to us:

• Social media is freeform – you do not know which topics or terms pop up. Social media can be described by “VVV” = volume, velocity, variability.
• Sentiment: Document level only is useless as not the complete document has a sentiment. You need to cut down the data but for this you need to understand the relevance of each part. You can’t be accurate at but at least be consistent with sentiment.
• Accuracy: Often contributions are based on sarcasm, wording etc. but the most important question is the why. Sentiment alone is not useful at all.
• Influence: It is difficult to understand what influence in social media is but it is certainly not the number of followers. Influence has a tremendous amount of context going with it.
• Reach: Number of tweets on a topic or articles on a topic is not actually relevant. Actual context is important to see that people are actually discussing the topic.
• Engagement: Means nothing in the way it is used today by analytics. Spending time on a page or in forums is only valuable if you can measure that it leads to a measurable result (purchase) or meaningful contribution like a comment.

Most of the theoretical aspects of understanding are based in cognitive science and psychology. A lot of progress has been made in the past in understanding the mechanisms of perception, recognition and decision making. I will in due turn report and discuss some of these findings that are important in relation to the skills we use to process information. Many of these capabilities are the basis of cognitive tasks in everybody’s daily work environment. Given the overwhelming growth of information flow it is desirable to create software products and components that allow us to focus on the important tasks and free us from noise and routine tasks. This is the goal of intelligent document understanding software that we will see emerge more and more in the future. 

This web site publishes articles in irregular intervals. Stay tuned and watch out for new information. I recommend to sign up to these posts using the RSS feed or either Twitter or Google+. The two latter streams will provide additional information and links to related sites and events. Feel free to comment on the posts or send me an e-mail for additional comments or questions. 

In addition this web site hosts several static pages. One about the company Skilja GmbH with a little bit of information what we do in the world of software development and consulting as well as one about the author of these pages. We also we will provide a number of fundamental articles as static pages that can be reached from the menu and static links. These basic articles will be more elaborate than posts and can serve as a reference so you can find relevant information for the topics discussed. Finally we might even add some whitepapers in the future to summarize fundamental concepts.

For now we hope you stay tuned and draw some value from this site.

Alexander Goerke