40,000 documents, read automatically

Every shipment that moved through Atlas Freight arrived wrapped in paper: bills of lading, customs forms, invoices, each in a slightly different layout from a slightly different partner. Somewhere in the building, people were reading those documents and typing what they said into a system, forty thousand times a month. It worked, in the sense that things kept moving, but it was slow, expensive, and quietly error-prone in a business where one mistyped figure becomes a customs problem three countries away. The off-the-shelf OCR tools Atlas had tried could read a clean form; they fell apart on the messy, real-world variety that made up most of the pile. What Atlas needed wasn't scanning; it was understanding.