Fire safety services firm automates certificate generation end-to-end

1The problem

• Staff keyed client and inspection data into official PDF certificate templates by hand — every serial number, address, telephone, and authorized person typed from scratch.
• The source data lived in years of legacy PDF forms in two client groups, so records were scattered and impossible to validate against.
• Serial-number prefixes, authorized-person mappings, and next-due dates depended on tribal knowledge rather than rules.
• One bad cell meant a misprinted official certificate — the cost of a typo was a client-facing document.

2What we did

1. 1A master-list extractor reads the legacy PDF forms, pulls the embedded form data out as structured records, and maps coded values — regions, building types, unit types — back into readable English or Chinese.
2. 2The consolidated master list became the single source of truth for both client groups, with creation and modification dates preserved from the original forms.
3. 3A certificate robot runs every 15 minutes, scanning each team's input folder for new sub-record workbooks.
4. 4Before anything else, it backs up the master list — and backs it up again after the run — so every change is recoverable.
5. 5Every row is validated first: required fields, serial-number prefixes and suffixes, telephone and authorized-person enrichment, and next-due dates filled from rules — invalid rows are logged with the reason instead of stalling the batch.
6. 6Valid rows are typed into the official certificate PDF template, with authorized-person lookups switching by certificate class and duplicate serial numbers handled deterministically.
7. 7Completed certificates are filed, the master list and run log updated, and a notification email closes every cycle — failures included, so nothing dies silently.

3Inside the Platform