Planning resources
Plan document intelligence around the source material, required evidence, quality thresholds, security boundaries, and business workflow.
A useful starting sequence is OCR → validate → RAG → controlled action. Use OCR when information is trapped in scans, forms, and image-only PDFs. Validate extracted text and fields before retrieval. Use RAG to ground answers in approved knowledge, then add automation only where the evidence and approval path are clear. For a worked example of retrieval design, read why legal RAG needs hybrid search.
Project checklists
Models are only one component. Strong RAG and OCR projects begin with representative documents, defined user needs, measurable acceptance criteria, and a clear route for uncertain results.
List the repositories the service may search, who owns them, who can access them, and how quickly changes must appear. Collect representative user questions and identify the source material that should support each answer.
Review RAG development servicesGather clean and difficult examples across layouts, scan quality, handwriting, tables, stamps, languages, and missing pages. Define the fields, document classes, confidence signals, and exception rules the downstream workflow requires.
Review OCR document processingFor OCR, compare critical fields and structures with human-reviewed truth data. For RAG, test retrieval relevance, citation support, completeness, refusal behavior, latency, and cost separately so a fluent answer cannot hide weak evidence.
Record data sensitivity, residency, retention, identity, source permissions, audit requirements, and model-provider constraints. Decide whether managed APIs, private cloud, on-premise infrastructure, or a hybrid design fits the operating risk.
Identify where documents arrive, how versions and permissions are maintained, and where structured outputs or cited answers must go. Include document systems, shared drives, databases, line-of-business tools, APIs, and human review queues.
Start with one document family, a defined group of users, known success criteria, and an owner for exceptions. Agree what remains manual, what can be automated, and what evidence is required before any consequential action.
Decision guide
RAG and OCR solve different parts of a document workflow. They often work together, but neither should be added unless the input and output justify it.
Evaluation plan
Include common documents, rare formats, poor scans, missing fields, conflicting sources, ambiguous questions, permission boundaries, and cases where the system should decline to answer.
Record whether OCR read the page correctly, validation caught a problem, retrieval found the right evidence, and the answer stayed within that evidence. This makes improvement work specific.
Monitor new layouts, source updates, access changes, unsupported answers, low-confidence extractions, reviewer decisions, latency, and cost. Assign owners for content, quality, security, and exceptions.
Project planning
Share representative files, the questions or fields your team needs, current systems, security constraints, and the decisions people make today. We will map the OCR, validation, RAG, and approval components required for a focused pilot.