How to extract information from product safety data sheets

Maintaining a database with current and changing information is typically manual, mundane, time-intensive, and error-prone work for humans. Therefore automating such a process would be very valuable. 

Automation Hero solves this problem. For example — in a recent implementation, a customer needed to extract multiple pieces of information from “Product Safety Datasheets” and then update them in the company’s internal database. This video explains the different steps implemented in the Automation Hero platform to achieve this goal with very high accuracy.

The first part of the automation is integration into the customer’s IT landscape. The customer accomplished this step easily using the out-of-the-box connectors that are part of the platform.

Since these are unstructured or semi-structured documents, extracting the information from them is the biggest challenge. Because the documents lack “structure,” legacy fixed-form OCR engines that use rules-based approaches to find pure patterns will not work.  

This is where the “magic” happens. Automation Hero combines different AI engines that access and extract the desired field values from the documents.  Our approach is entirely independent of both structural layout and vendor. It’s also effortless to set up and achieves significantly higher accuracy results.  

Finally, the video illustrates how easy it is to set up a custom human-in-the-loop user interface that allows employees to approve decisions. Of course, our human-in-the-loop setup is optional. Still, the video demonstrates how our attended automation provides an extra layer of security for employees while verifying your extraction results. 

For the business, the impact means significantly less time spent on this process by employees, so employees are now free to do much more valuable work. As a result, the business process is more efficient, and the data quality is higher because of reduced human error. The video also demonstrates how quick and easy it was to build this automation, which immediately translated into very fast time-to-value for the customer.