Marcus Lien

Geometry, not model quality, determines whether PDF table extraction actually works in production.

Four structural causes drive extraction failures on fields that business workflows depend on.

Vendors mix four different metrics into one accuracy claim, causing pipelines to fail in production.

Document pipelines need idempotency engineered separately at each processing stage.

Document extraction needs different reliability patterns than payment webhooks.

Routing low-confidence extractions prevents review queues from becoming bottlenecks.

Misclassified documents and missed fallbacks sink pipelines faster than bad parsing.