As Maidstone Borough Council provides vital services for close to 200,000 residents in the borough, the need for a more modern and cloud powered document processing flow was high on the agenda.

Both physical and digital forms arrived in abundance and the usual method of manual, human led processing was costly, error prone and often non-compliant with council standards.

Maidstone Borough Council needed a cloud partner that could provide not only specialised AI tools to automate document processing, but also reduce costs by storing files and utilising the best features within AWS.

Firemind were able to quickly understand the challenges faced by the Council, draw up the necessary infrastructure and workflow as well as build and test before launching the solution.

We developed and launched a three pronged approach:

• Using a natural-language processing service (NLP) called Amazon Comprehend to simplify the document processing workflow. Extracting the relevant text and details from forms and using machine learning to find the connections.
• Perfecting an Amazon Textract process that enabled printed text as well as handwriting extraction, working in unison with Amazon Comprehend.
• Allowing for language translation within scanned documents by using Amazon Translate.

Turning human processes into an AI & ML automation freed up valuable time for staff to work on other projects and add further value to the many varied services offered by the Council.

Using a machine learned model for accurate processing ensured all form scans and submissions were measured at the same consistent level. With consistency comes compliance. Providing a workflow that followed exact rules and parameters.

The reduction in human error could be seen within less than a week, highlighting the benefits of a cloud solution that didn’t get tired, lose focus or make submission errors.