Simplifyd

what I built

I was the lead engineer, really the only engineer for a year or so, and then we started to bring on some more. We automated accounts payable and order entry, and a few other things, for a massive steel company.

Accounts payable came in, and we uploaded a processed document directly to their ERP. We also had to set up an endpoint into their ERP to get packing slips, and there were just a billion edge cases that we had to handle: no packing slip, no this, no that, fields missing. Just a bunch of workflows we set up, and we had to work very tightly with these people to get it all working.

It was all programmatic, all in Python, no machine learning or AI involved. I built basically everything from the ground up.

hardest part

The hardest problem was order entry, because this was before AI and computer vision were good. Initially we were using Amazon Textract to get fields from accounts payable, but that didn't work for order entry. Order entry had to be extracted through patterns in the PDF that we set up and detected over time.