“Document Automation” is a term that has traditionally been one directional. It has meant the automation of document outputs from data within a database. However, with the emergence of OCR technologies the phrase “Document Automation” has become bi-directional since it can now also refer to the automation of documents having their data extracted from paper files and pushed to digital form within a database. The market is now beginning to conflate the term. Such is the case for Saleforce’s Intelligent Document Automation and Drawloop’s Document Automation.

Since 2006, Drawloop has offered it’s Document Automation tool. Drawloop document generation is a Salesforce add-on accessible from the Salesforce App Exchange. It’s purpose is to provide a low-code solution for merging data from objects in Salesforce to “paper” documents via templates built in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF. It’s akin to a powerful mail merge tool, but also offers capabilities that allow for dynamic clauses, dashboarding, aggregates and data transformation.

In February 2021, Salesforce announced it’s own document automation with a new innovative feature called Intelligent Document Automation or IDA for short. Salesforce IDA is an OCR technology that aides the transfer of data from scanned paper documents over to objects within Saleforce. The technology leverages Amazon’s Textract service offered via Amazon Web Services to perform optical character recognition of any printed text, handwriting or structured data using machine learning. This helps organizations rapidly move their data from paper form to digital form.

In summary, Drawloop provides the ability to extract data from Saleforce and push it into documents. While Salesforce IDA provides the ability to import data from documents into Salesforce. They are essentially the inverse of each other. And rather than competing, they can complement each other.