  The originality of this publication is to look at the subject of IDP
(Intelligent Document Processing) from the perspective of an end-user and
industrialist and not that of a Computer Science researcher. This domain is one
part of the challenge of information digitalisation that constitutes the
Industrial Revolution of the twenty first century (Industry 4.0) and this paper
looks specifically at the difficult areas of classifying, extracting
information and subsequent integration into business processes with respect to
forms and invoices. Since the focus is on practical implementation a brief
review is carried out of the market in commercial tools for OCR, document
classification and data extraction in so far as this is publicly available
together with pricing (if known). Brief definitions of the main terms
encountered in Computer Science publications and commercial prospectuses are
provided in order to de-mystify the language for the layman. A small number of
practical tests are carried out on a few real documents in order to illustrate
the capabilities of tools that are commonly available at a reasonable price.
The unsolved (so far) issue of tables contained in invoices is raised. The case
of a typical large industrial company is evoked where the requirement is to
extract 100 per cent of the information with 100 per cent reliability in order
to integrate into the back-end Enterprise Resource Planning system. Finally a
brief description is given of the state-of-the-art research by the huge
corporations who are pushing the boundaries of deep learning techniques further
and further with massive computing and financial power - progress that will
undoubtedly trickle down into the real world at some later date. The paper
finishes by asking the question whether the objectives and timing of the
commercial world and the progress of Computer Science are fully aligned.
