Parsing mill test certificates to ensure material compliance before shipment

Every coil, plate, or bar of steel arriving at the warehouse came with a mill test certificate documenting its chemical composition, mechanical properties (yield strength, tensile strength, elongation), heat number, and applicable standards (ASTM, EN, JIS). The quality team manually reviewed each MTC against customer PO specifications — a process that took 10-15 minutes per certificate. With 300+ MTCs arriving weekly, the backlog delayed shipments and occasionally allowed out-of-spec material to reach customers, resulting in costly returns and warranty claims.

The team set up extraction fields for chemical composition (C, Mn, Si, P, S, Cr, Ni, Mo percentages), mechanical properties (yield, tensile, elongation, hardness), heat number, grade, and certifying standard. Annotations were critical here — MTCs from different mills placed the same data in wildly different layouts, from structured tables to paragraph-form narratives. The correct extraction feature let the team standardize values (e.g., "0.08%" vs "0.08" vs "80 ppm" all mapped to the same numeric format). Chat queries like "Show all heats where carbon exceeds 0.10%" provided instant compliance screening.

• 300+ mill test certificates processed weekly with zero backlog
• Review time per MTC reduced from 12 minutes to under 1 minute (spot-check only)
• Out-of-spec shipments dropped to zero in the first 6 months
• 96% extraction accuracy on chemical composition fields after initial annotation round
• Quality team reallocated from data entry to supplier qualification and audit work