· Manfredi Miraula · Case Study · 2 min read
1,000+ documents processed automatically every month. Zero manual extraction.
A major pharmaceutical company was spending hours every week copying data by hand from unstructured regulatory documents. We built an automated extraction pipeline: less manual work, shorter turnaround and fewer errors.
Open a PDF, read it, copy the data into a spreadsheet, move on to the next one. For a team at a major pharmaceutical company, that was the week.
It took hours every week, and there were hundreds of documents a month to get through.
The problem
The company deals with a steady flow of regulatory documents: clinical reports, compliance dossiers, inspection reports, scanned paper forms. None of them follow a standard format. Structure, layout and terminology change from one document to the next and from one country to another.
That is why none of the existing automated tools could cope, and the team had to do it by hand.
The solution
We designed and put into production a pipeline that handles extraction from start to finish:
- Any input format: native PDFs, OCR scans, Word files, emails with attachments.
- Document classification: a model works out what kind of document it is and applies the right extraction rules.
- Structured data: the relevant fields are extracted, validated and written to the target system (ERP, database or data warehouse).
- Human review when needed: ambiguous cases are flagged to a person, with the context already filled in.
There are no rigid templates to maintain. The system copes with the variety of real documents.
The results
- Over 1,000 documents a month processed with no human intervention.
- No manual extraction for standard cases.
- Much shorter turnaround, from the moment a document arrives to the moment the data is ready.
- Better accuracy than manual entry, with a full audit trail.
The principle that applies everywhere
The same approach works in any sector that runs on unstructured documents: law firms, notaries, compliance teams, banks, insurers.
If someone on your team spends their days copying data from PDFs into Excel, there is a better way. You don’t need to overhaul the company. You need to find the right workflow and build something precise around it.
Have a similar problem? Get in touch and we’ll work out together whether we can help.