OCR to Production: A Playbook

Building OCR systems that work in demos is easy. Building ones that work in production with millions of documents is hard. Here's what I learned the hard way.

The Reality of Real Documents

Demo documents are clean, well-formatted, and high-resolution. Real documents are:

The Production Stack

1. Preprocessing Pipeline

2. Multi-Model Approach

Don't rely on a single OCR engine. We use:

3. Post-Processing Intelligence

Raw OCR output is messy. You need:

Scaling Challenges

Performance

Quality Assurance

Cost Management

Lessons Learned

The Bottom Line

Production OCR is 20% computer vision and 80% engineering. Focus on the engineering.