A real case — in production since 2026 · anonymised at the client's request
Railway maintenance workshop: retyping cut by 15×
A French workshop maintaining rail vehicles. Mechanics fill in repair orders by hand; the stores then retype them into Excel. This is where I built my first system — here's what changed.
The starting point
Backlogs of 50 to 150 documents
Each intervention produces a handwritten repair order: parts replaced, labour, vehicle concerned, signatures. These ORs are scanned in the workshop, then fully retyped in the stores — reference by reference, price by price. 10 to 15 minutes per document, with the classic risks: a misread reference, a price from memory, a document sent twice.
- Full manual retyping: 10–15 min per OR
- Backlogs of 50 to 150 documents
- References deciphered by eye, prices looked up by hand
- Duplicate sends nobody catches
- Two days of work to deliver a batch of 57 ORs
- AI reading of the scan: data extracted automatically
- Automatic cross-check against 2,700+ rate references
- Official Excel template filled, PDF generated
- Send log: duplicates impossible
- 1 minute of human review per document
The numbers
Measured in production, not in a demo
| Time per document | ÷ 15 |
| Admin work recovered | 25–35 h / month |
| Batch of 57 ORs: quality check | 57 / 57 verified |
| Duplicate sends since go-live | zero |
| Rate references maintained | 2,700+ |
A batch of 57 repair orders, which used to mean two days of retyping, is now delivered in a single session — checked document by document.
Why it never drifts
The three safeguards I built into the system
The AI never guesses
An illegible word, an unknown reference, a missing price: the system asks a precise question instead of inventing. Every uncertainty is settled by a human.
Document-by-document review
Every generated document is checked before sending. On the latest batch delivered: 57 out of 57 reviewed, zero errors passed on to the end client.
Anti-duplicate log
Every send is recorded in a log. A document already transmitted cannot go out a second time — even weeks later.
And for your teams, nothing changes: mechanics keep filling in their orders by hand, and a human keeps the final say before every send. It's the journey between paper and your files that's automated — not the people.
Your workshop
Your documents aren't that different
Repair orders, service records, job cards, site reports, delivery notes: if your teams retype paper, I can adapt the same system to your documents and your tools.