Acodis IDP Insights | Data Extraction | Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

Data Extraction From Large PDF Catalogues

Written by Dream Haddad | 08.10.2021 14:32:59

Imagine large PDF catalogues from suppliers—hundreds of pages with different products (e.g. screws, health care protective equipment or heavy industry spare parts). Such catalogues are a goldmine of data but are typically hard to access.

Still, in 2021 companies invest hours and hours copy/pasting the information from catalogues into their business systems for subsequent analysis or data visualisation. Let's elaborate on two use cases.

Use Case: Data/Product Comparision

Each product has specific data points such as features, benefits, product number or price. With Intelligent Document Processing, companies can now compare all these data points with just a few clicks over hundreds of catalogue pages. Here the key benefit is the fast access to the data, which significantly reduces the amount of manual work.

Use Case: Data Treasure

Imagine large industrial companies that have an incredible amount of different parts in their supply chain. It is now key to understand the entire market. Can we get the same piece at a better price, faster or with more advanced features? All this information is available – often publically but hard to access due to its unstructured nature. Powerful data extraction tools enable companies to access such data treasures and create a competitive edge. 

These are two example use cases that access the sheer amount of data from large and complex catalogues—time to understand how you can automate the process today.

How to Automate Data Extraction From Documents?

Acodis allows you to extract data from any catalogue in any language in four steps:

  1. Upload the catalogues 
  2. Mark the data points that you want to extract (e.g. product name, features, benefits, product number and price)
  3. Train the machine learning algorithm with a few examples (Acodis will continuously get better with every document)
  4. Process all your catalogues and export the data

The best thing about data extraction with Acodis is that you do not need any data scientists. Everyone in your team can process the catalogues over our web interface.

Convert PDFs to XML files

Let's be honest, PDFs are a pain to work with - even more so when you want to extract and convert data from them. Acodis enables you to easily do this in a few simple steps. Using Intelligent Document Processing, Acodis automatically transforms structured data from PDFs directly into an XML form.

Curious to learn more?