HVW puts itself on the digital map with E-digit

The Auxiliary Fund for Unemployment Benefits (Hulpkas voor Werkloosheidsuitkeringen, HVW) receives a lot of paper documents to process daily, creating a considerable administrative burden. Moreover, processing these documents takes a lot of time when everything has to be done manually, and an error is never far away. To optimize this administrative process, HVW looked in the direction of artificial intelligence. That turned out to be the right direction because an intuitive AI application now helps them every day — significantly increasing work efficiency.

HVW is a public social security institution responsible for paying unemployment and other related benefits. Unemployed people who are not unionized can count on HVW for these benefits. HVW employees draw benefit application files, which are then submitted to the National Employment Office (Rijksdienst voor Arbeidsvoorziening, RVA)—once approved by RVA, the application proceeds to the actual payment. To ensure that this entire process runs as smoothly as possible, HVW actively seeks ways to innovate and digitize.

Get rid of the mountain of paperwork

HVW currently processes 117 different types of paper documents, including verification cards and C4 forms. Unemployed people who want to apply for benefits typically fill out their personal information on a paper document that they bring or send to an HVW office. HVW staff manually digitizes the handwritten data to complete the application file. That task is very time-consuming, repetitive, and does not always go flawlessly. However, HVW is required by law to provide unemployment cards in hard copy, so completely digitizing the process is not a solution.

An innovative and artificially intelligent solution

Initially, HVW turned to Cronos Public Services for a solution. Together, they set out to find an innovative and artificially intelligent way to reduce the high workload for employees, create time savings and reduce the burden of errors. So, Cronos Public Services enlisted our help. The goal: develop a user-friendly AI application for HVW to automate some of the manual work, thus relieving the burden on employees.

AI with a human touch

To create the application, our development team collected a large amount of handwritten data, such as dates and social security numbers. From that data, they managed to train an AI model that could also recognize future data with 99 percent accuracy. This was a complex task, as each handwriting is unique. This is also why human validation of digitized data is still happening. So not complete automation, but efficient and time-saving cooperation between humans and machine.

An immediate hit

In the initial phase, E-digit was only used to read control cards. An expansion of the project's scope to the other 116 document types is currently under development. In total, more than 100,000 documents have already been read by E-digit. Moreover, about 100 HVW employees actively use the tool daily, so 30 percent of work is now done via automatic recognition. A future without artificial intelligence is unthinkable, and HVW is responding to this perfectly with E-digit.

No shortage of expertise

The intuitive AI application demonstrates not only the power of artificial intelligence but also the vital contribution of human intelligence. Our team included experienced NLP engineers, designers, and trainers of AI models familiar with building a customized platform for intelligent document processing. Meanwhile, further application expansion is already on the agenda thanks to the successful combination of a dynamic team with expertise and a government agency with an innovative vision.