📄 Production System · Document Automation

Document Automation —
Scan to Dataverse

A physical document off a scanner becomes a structured, queryable Dataverse record — automatically, in under 30 seconds. Zero manual touch points. Zero custom code.

0
Manual Steps
<30s
End-to-End Processing
100%
Audit Trail
The Problem

A Scanner Is Not a Database

Scanned documents traditionally land as unstructured files in a folder — someone still has to open each one, read it, and manually key the data into a system of record. At any meaningful volume, that manual step is the bottleneck. The goal: staff place a document in the scanner and walk away.

Production System  ·  Power Automate · AI Builder · Dataverse · SharePoint  ·  Zero manual touchpoints
The Solution

A 7-Step Zero-Touch Pipeline

Real-time, event-driven, and confidence-scored — the pipeline only asks a human to look when it isn't sure.

  • Scanner → Shared Mailbox — the MFP scanner emails the scanned document to a dedicated M365 shared mailbox. The only human action in the entire pipeline.
  • Power Automate Trigger — the flow fires the instant an email with attachment arrives. No polling, no batch — real-time.
  • AI Builder Document Processing — a custom-trained model reads the PDF and extracts Invoice Number, Date, Vendor Name, Total Amount, Due Date, with confidence scores per field.
  • Dataverse Record Created — extracted fields map directly to Dataverse columns. Structured, searchable, reportable data — not just a stored file.
  • SharePoint Storage — the original scanned file is saved to a SharePoint library as source of truth, linked to the Dataverse record by unique ID.
  • Confidence-Based Routing — if any field's confidence score falls below threshold, staff is notified for manual review; otherwise the pipeline completes silently.
  • Audit Trail — timestamp, source email, extracted values, and confidence scores are all logged to Dataverse for every document processed.

V1 → V2 Evolution: Version 1 (production) solved routing and storage — scan goes to SharePoint, list record created, staff notified. The gap: document content still required manual review. Version 2 adds AI Builder — same trigger, same flow architecture, dramatically different data quality. The extraction problem is eliminated entirely.

Explore the Full Case Study

Interactive pipeline walkthrough with sample extracted data

View Interactive Showcase →
Production Results

Zero-Touch, Infinitely Scalable

0 manual steps between scanner and Dataverse record
Under 30 seconds end-to-end processing per document
Zero transcription errors — AI Builder handles all extraction
Fully searchable records — invoice number, vendor, amount queryable
100% audit trail — timestamp, source email, confidence scores logged
Infinitely scalable — same pipeline handles 1 or 1,000 documents per day
Power Automate AI Builder Dataverse SharePoint Online Microsoft 365 OCR Document Processing