Unlocking Data: Enterprise PDF Scanning with Azure AI Document Intelligence
PDFs are where data goes to die. For one of our fintech clients, "data entry" meant a team of five highly paid analysts spending 4 hours a day manually copying numbers from scanned invoices into their ERP system. It was slow, boring, and error-prone.
Beyond Basic OCR
Standard OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools are dumb. They just give you a wall of text. They don't know that "1,200 AED" is the Total Amount and "100 AED" is the VAT.
To solve this, we implemented Azure AI Document Intelligence (formerly Form Recognizer). Unlike standard regex parsers, we trained a Custom Neural Model on just 50 samples of their historical documents.
The Intelligent Pipeline
- Ingestion: PDFs arriving via email are automatically grabbed by an Azure Logic App.
- Classification: The AI first determines: Is this an Invoice? A Receipt? Or a Contract?
- Extraction: It pulls out complex tables, line items, and vendor details with a Confidence Score.
- Human-in-the-Loop: If the Confidence Score drops below 85% (e.g., a coffee stain on the paper), it flags the document for human review. Otherwise, it goes straight to the SQL database.
Real World Value
The system now processes 500+ pages per minute. We didn't just automate a task; we created a searchable knowledge base. The client can now ask questions like, "How much did we spend on shipping in Q3?" and get an instant answer from data that was previously locked in PDF pixels.
