12 years ago we founded Skilja in the middle of the German winter with the goal to create the best possible Document Understanding or IDP (as others call it) solution. And now we look back and we are proud that we have achieved the goal – at least in our view. A lot has happened on the way. We have created:

• A leading classification technology with statistical, semantic and LLM classifiers with more than 1.000 customers world wide
• An extraction framework that allows a customer to do anything from forms, invoices to totally freeform contracts in the same environment with no technology disruption from one designer
• Our own recognition engine – AI based – as we were not happy with existing engines
• A powerful process platform – used by > 250 enterprises world wide on premise and in the cloud with some of them processing 500.000 documents per day.

And of course we look back to a big number of great projects and successes in the market and a lot of happy customers. This we achieved not alone but only with the help of our partners that one by one joined our partner network in the last 12 years. Thanks a lot to them for their commitment, their dedication, their encouragement.

Sometimes we also ask ourselves – how did we do that? In the end we are just a medium sized company with (now) 24 developers and engineers. The answer – I believe – is FOCUS. We were always very clear what we wanted to achieve and focused our energy on these ideas and did not allow ourselves to be distracted. This is the key of our success together with our absolut customer centric approach (which might seem in conflict with focus, but in reality is not if it is handled and communicated correctly). And of course we have a tremendous team and pool of talent which I am very grateful for. It also seems that we made some correct technological decisions on our way which pay of now – focus on services, web interfaces, machine learning approaches, ease of use, high quality of software development with most advanced tools…

Skilja was created as an independent technology provider with a strong partner network and our plan is to stay such in the years to come. Independence is no value in itself but is the core of our ability to innovate. We do not need to look at quarterly results but can define long term development goals, decide on them and follow them to the end. This makes us strong and successful and will continue to do so.

Thank all of you to make that possible.

Alexander Goerke, CEO

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!

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.

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