Material certificate automation
How two steel distributors are equipping themselves with a solution to automate the processing of their material certificates (Mill Test Reports): a platform developed by Openmind with Anthropic’s Claude.
The project in numbers
The certificate arrives by email
The useful fields are read, whatever the language
A person confirms each document
By heat number or product code
Consolidated file sent to the customer
The context
In the steel industry, every heat of raw material produced by a mill comes with a Mill Test Report (MTR): a certificate signed by a chemist, attesting to the composition and properties of the metal. That certificate must then follow the material all the way down the chain, from the mill to the distributor and on to the end customer, who must be able to account for it if a problem arises.
For distributors, this tracking is especially complex: a batch of parts delivered to a customer does not always come from a single heat, and the same heat can end up in several different batches. Without a structured system, every certificate received by email had to be checked manually and then filed in a folder, with no way to search inside the PDFs themselves.
For one of the two companies, the issue had become urgent: the person who had handled this task for several years was about to retire, with no trained successor. The work is considered essential, since it bears on compliance and material quality, but it is thankless and hard to staff.
Rather than each building its own solution, the two companies chose to co-fund a shared one, developed by Openmind from an already working prototype, to speed up its rollout and reduce its risks.
The solution
Rather than starting from scratch, the two companies chose to co-fund an already proven solution, developed by Openmind (Code&Steel), and to steer its evolution through their feedback from the field.
The solution sits upstream of existing systems, without replacing them. It monitors a dedicated mailbox: as soon as a Mill Test Report arrives, the document is picked up automatically, whatever its language. It also handles scanned documents, with reliability tracked separately for native and scanned files.
Artificial intelligence extracts only the information that is genuinely useful for searching: the heat number, the associated product lines, the certificate number, the supplier name and the report’s production date. The rest of the information, less relevant day to day, is not extracted: the goal is not to digitize everything, but to make what matters quick to find.
Every document is still validated by a person before it is filed or sent: human validation is an integral part of the process and confirms, at every step, the accuracy of the automatic recognition. The solution can also automatically redact irrelevant or confidential information before sharing externally, a feature added during the project following feedback from both companies.
In practice, the solution makes it possible to:
Automatically receive and process Mill Test Reports sent by email
Extract key information with artificial intelligence, whatever the document’s language
Instantly find a certificate by heat number or product code
Have a person validate every document before it is filed or sent
Automatically redact irrelevant or confidential information before sending to a third party
Archive all certificates in one central, searchable place
Combine several certificates into a single consolidated document, selecting the heats to include
Send the document to the end customer by email, directly from the solution
Results and next steps
Both companies contributed at every stage of the project: the initial requirements gathering, testing during development, and then adjusting priorities. The automatic redaction feature, for example, was not planned at the outset; it was added along the way following their feedback from the field.
The solution was designed as a modular foundation, able to evolve with real needs: eventual integration with existing ERP systems, new features prioritized with users, and possible rollout to other distributors in the industry, in Canada and the United States alike.
This solution is designed to turn a manual, repetitive and risky task into a reliable, fast and scalable process, tailored to real needs on the ground.
Developed by Openmind in short cycles and co-funded by the two participating companies, the solution has gone from a working prototype to a platform ready for production deployment, informed at every step by feedback from its future users.
Contact
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