ChimpKey converts PDFs for EDI

It's hard to recall how businesses functioned before the arrival of the PDF format in the early 1990s. Adobe's Portable Document Format allowed computer users to create and share formatted documents that could be viewed on a wide range of computer platforms and software. 

In today's business world, invoices, purchase orders and other documents are routinely generated  in PDF format because, like US dollars, PDFs are accepted anywhere and everywhere. 

But rivers of PDFs don't always flow smoothly between one computer system and another. Some companies want to extract the the information contained in a PDF document, like customer names, dates, products ordered and prices, and store that information in their own systems and databases.

Some unfortunate employee might be tasked to retype all that data. But a better solution would be using an automated service like ChimpKey. ChimpKey offers a conversion service designed for PDF to XML or PDF to EDI, a standardized format for electronic data interchange.

ChimpKey customers send their PDF documents to ChimpKey's servers where PDF data aid extracted and delivered in a manner that follows a customers's data maps. Documents can be sent manually or through an automated flow process. ChimpKey monitors the process to find documents that fail to to map. The process is adjusted until all documents can flow smoothly. 

For more details about ChimpKey and how the service works, visit the ChimpKey website where you can submit a sample PDF. 

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Written by Ric Manning

Follow me on Twitter @ricmanning and read my technology columns at My Well Being.