01
The failure surface
An intelligent document processing pipeline contains several failure points: acquisition, recognition, classification, extraction and routing. One end-to-end score can obscure which stage needs attention.
02
What to measure
Test a fixed model/API boundary first. Record downstream parse failures independently, then trace weak conditions back to representative inputs and retained provider responses.
03
A scoped evaluation
Define a versioned evaluation contract, frozen inputs and explicit evidence requirements. Run the same holdout when changing a model, prompt or normalization rule, and preserve earlier results.
04
What the evidence supports
A program can return condition-level reports, targeted synthetic cohorts and a retest. Integration and private deployment requirements belong in the statement of work.