The problem
A lot of businesses still run on documents — pick tickets, dispatch notes, supplier paperwork — that arrive as PDFs and get read, and re-typed, by a person. It works fine at low volume. Then volume grows, and someone's whole day becomes retyping the same handful of fields off hundreds of pages.
What was built
A pipeline that splits multi-page PDFs (warehouse "pick ticket" documents, in this case) into per-page files, runs OCR across each page, and extracts the specific fields that actually matter into structured, usable data — instead of a folder of PDFs nobody can search, total, or report on.
Why this is the hard part
OCR on one clean scanned page is the easy case. Real-world documents are inconsistent — different templates, skewed scans, fields that shift position from one supplier's layout to another's. A pipeline built for production has to extract by pattern and context, not fixed coordinates, and it has to flag anything it isn't confident about rather than silently guessing wrong. That "don't fail silently" discipline is the same one behind Monitoring & Support generally.