Amazon Textract almost never fails loudly. A working guide to turning external PDFs and scans into structured data: picking the right operation per document family, parsing the block graph, routing on per-field confidence, and catching the limits that silently truncate your records.
A CV parsing pipeline stops being a parser the moment a score sorts a list. Where Textract and Bedrock actually fit, why redacting names does nothing for bias, and what to document before anyone asks you to explain a ranking.
A confident answer with a citation from a matter the reader was walled off from. Nothing crashed, nothing alerted. Building legal document intelligence on AWS with Textract, Bedrock and OpenSearch is the easy half; the hard half is tenant isolation, verified deletion, S3 Object Lock holds, what leaves the account, and an audit trail that names the actual user.
Most as-planned vs as-built analysis compares the baseline to the last P6 update and calls the result an as-built. It isn't one. This is how to build the data layer underneath a delay analysis: versioned XER ingestion, activity identity across renumbering, a first-appearance table that proves when every actual date entered the record, calendar-safe float, and record linking that proposes candidates instead of asserting cause.
Textract rarely fails loudly. It returns a plausible result that is quietly incomplete: a truncated result set, a tick box read as an empty string, a clause split across a page break. A practitioner's guide to the failure modes that actually bite when you point Amazon Textract at contracts, technical reports and correspondence, plus how to choose between sync and async, which feature types are worth paying for, and where Textract stops being the right tool.
A layer-by-layer architecture for a construction dispute intelligence platform: hashed intake and immutable originals, OCR with page coordinates, a versioned Primavera P6 schedule plane, an event model that joins documents to activities, hybrid retrieval on pgvector, and a generation layer bounded by human confirmation. Written around what each layer prevents.