On a freight desk the inbound documents arrive in mixed formats, and intelligent document processing is the layer that reads a commercial invoice, packing list, or bill of lading and turns it into structured fields a system can act on. It classifies each document, extracts the relevant data, and validates the extracted values rather than leaving the result as loose text. It is not the same as plain optical character recognition, which only converts text-images into machine-readable characters without understanding what the document is or which fields matter; intelligent document processing adds the artificial intelligence layer that interprets, structures, and checks the captured data.
Glossary
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
Intelligent document processing is a technology that combines optical character recognition with artificial intelligence and machine learning to classify documents, extract structured data from them, and validate the results.