Extracting intelligence from PDF files leads to enhanced custom reporting
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
Portable document format (PDF) has become the de facto standard for creating documents that need to be shared within and across enterprises. It makes all types of correspondence—from marketing brochures to purchase orders and invoices—easy to share and simple to print.
But working with PDF files isn't always convenient. For instance, someone receiving a PDF file cannot edit its content, nor can they pull out pieces of information for analysis. Many businesspeople find that frustrating, says Rob Graham, a product manager with Datawatch, a business intelligence software supplier that claims to have a solution to this problem.
Graham says Version 8 of Datawatch's flagship Monarch data-mining tool offers the ability to extract data directly from PDF files and import it to spreadsheets, databases, or other analytic applications. Datawatch developed this functionality, according to Graham, because it saw PDF files "increasingly representing an important source of new business intelligence—but one that was locked away, tantalizingly out of reach."
Adobe Systems created the PDF to enable easy distribution and sharing of documents, regardless of the application or computing platform on which the documents are created. Users can take documents out of their native applications—word processing, accounting, engineering packages, etc.—and convert them to PDF using Adobe Acrobat. A number of free programs for reading PDF files can be downloaded from the Internet, including Adobe Acrobat Reader. But none of those programs allow users to edit—or extract data from—a PDF.
Garerth Horton, a Datawatch product specialist, says mining data from PDF files has proven to be a challenge even for the pros.
"There are several tools on the market for converting PDF documents back to text files," Horton says. "But mining data from transactional and reporting documents involves a different order of complexity. [The Monarch data-mining program] examines the PDF files for information that has been placed in columns or grids, which typically is how business intelligence data is arranged. It then maps that onto a grid to create a template for analysis."
Custom wheel manufacturer Rimex Supply, British Columbia, has used Monarch for more than four years to generate custom reporting and data analysis from its MAPICS SyteLine ERP system. IT Administrator Darren Kennedy says the PDF-enabled Version 8 has made it easier for Rimex to sort the details of the engineering data it receives from customers.
"We have a lot of engineering data sent back and forth between us and our customers," says Kennedy. "Previously, we retyped a large amount of data because our customers had the native applications—we just got the PDF. Now we're able to extract information from any PDF files."
