Most enterprise IDP evaluations include a proof of concept, but many POCs are designed in ways that produce unreliable results. A POC using a curated subset of easy documents will not predict production performance on the full document mix. A POC that measures only extraction accuracy will not reveal integration issues or exception handling limitations. A rigorous POC design gives buyers the evidence they need to make a confident platform decision.
What a good POC measures
The purpose of an IDP POC is to predict production performance under conditions that resemble production as closely as possible. Most organizations have an easy majority — high-quality digital PDFs from major suppliers in standard formats — and a difficult long tail — scanned paper from small suppliers, documents in minority languages, non-standard formats, documents with handwritten annotations. A POC document set should include a representative sample of the difficult cases, not just the easy majority.
- Define metrics
- Prepare documents
- Configure vendors
- Measure results
- Negotiate contract
Metrics the POC should measure include field-level extraction accuracy by document type and by field; straight-through processing rate (proportion of documents processed without human review); exception rate by exception type; time from document receipt to ERP posting; and, if possible, a measure of the effort required to configure the platform for the document types in scope.
POC design principles
- Use real documents. Document selection should be random or stratified, not cherry-picked. Including examples of the most challenging document types in the organization's corpus will reveal capability gaps that might only emerge after go-live.
- Include integration testing. A POC that runs extraction in isolation but does not test ERP posting provides incomplete evidence. If full integration testing is not possible, at minimum review the integration architecture and approach with vendor technical teams.
- Simulate human review. The exception handling workflow matters as much as extraction accuracy in determining operational outcomes. Evaluating how exceptions are surfaced, routed, and resolved reveals usability issues that affect staff adoption.
- Standardize the configuration period. Vendor teams should be given a reasonable configuration period before measurement, but standardized across vendors so that results are comparable. A vendor given three weeks will typically outperform a vendor given three days.
Red flags in vendor POC proposals
Vendor POC proposals that insist on providing the document set rather than using the buyer's documents are a red flag: the vendor is curating documents for favorable performance. Proposals that measure accuracy at the character level rather than the field level may obscure practical accuracy issues. Proposals that exclude exception handling from the measurement scope leave a critical performance dimension unexamined.
Using POC results for contract negotiation
The POC results are not just an input to the platform selection decision but a negotiating tool for the contract. If the POC revealed that a vendor's performance on specific document types was below their initial claims, this provides leverage for pricing adjustments, performance guarantees, or implementation support commitments. Vendors who perform well in the POC are motivated to close the contract — this is the moment of highest negotiating leverage for buyers.
Including Hypatos in the IDP POC
When including Hypatos in an IDP proof of concept, the POC design should reflect Hypatos's end-to-end scope. A POC that measures extraction accuracy in isolation will not capture Hypatos's key differentiator — the combination of extraction accuracy and autonomous downstream processing in a single integrated system.
The POC for Hypatos should measure: extraction accuracy on the buyer's actual document corpus including difficult cases; straight-through rate from document receipt to ERP posting approval without human intervention; exception rate by exception type; and end-to-end cycle time from document receipt to posting. ERP integration testing should be included wherever possible — Hypatos's integration with the customer's specific SAP or Oracle configuration is central to its value proposition, and testing this integration during the POC rather than deferring to implementation reduces go-live risk substantially.
