February 23, 2026
ACS Industries is the world’s largest vertically integrated wire mesh manufacturer. Their operations team was drowning in purchase orders — 400 per week, arriving via email in PDFs, spreadsheets, images, and plain email text. They tried UiPath Document Understanding to automate extraction. It didn’t work.
UiPath’s document processing module took roughly 1.5 minutes just to digitize a single page. Character confusion was constant — “S” read as “5,” “2” read as “Z.” Scanned PDFs failed at a rate of roughly 10%. And the entire system required UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, and robot licenses just to extract data from a PDF.
ACS switched to Lido. Today they process all 400 weekly POs automatically with complete accuracy, saving 30 hours per week and avoiding a new hire. Here’s what manufacturing teams should know about making the same move.
Lido is the best UiPath alternative for manufacturing teams that need fast, accurate document extraction without deploying an entire RPA platform. It processes any PO or invoice format without templates, model training, or per-document configuration — and handles handwritten notes, mixed formats, and large files that UiPath Document Understanding struggles with. ACS Industries switched to Lido and cut 30 hours per week of manual PO processing.
UiPath is a market leader in RPA. But Document Understanding — now rebranded as UiPath IXP — is a module within the RPA platform, not a standalone document processing tool. For manufacturing teams that need to extract data from POs, packing slips, and vendor documents, this creates problems at every level.
UiPath Document Understanding doesn’t work on its own. You need UiPath Studio to build workflows, Orchestrator to manage them, and robot licenses to run them. For a manufacturing operations team that just wants to extract PO data and push it into an ERP, this is like buying an entire car to use the radio.
The licensing alone is prohibitive for mid-market manufacturers. UiPath’s smallest document processing bundle requires a 60,000-page minimum. Unattended robot licenses run $6,000–$8,000 per year. Developer seats cost another $3,000. And none of this pricing is published — you need a sales conversation just to get a quote.
A single-page, 694KB PDF takes UiPath approximately 1.5 minutes just for digitization — before any extraction or validation happens. For a manufacturing team processing 400 POs per week, that math doesn’t work. At 1.5 minutes per page on multi-page POs, you’re looking at hours of processing time that should take minutes.
Lido processes entire documents in seconds. The same 400 POs that would consume hours in UiPath’s pipeline complete in a fraction of the time.
UiPath’s OCR engine confuses similar characters: “S” reads as “5,” “2” reads as “Z.” In manufacturing, where part numbers and quantities flow directly into ERP systems, a single character error can trigger wrong parts being pulled, incorrect inventory counts, or shipment delays. The approximately 10% failure rate on scanned PDFs compounds this — one in ten documents requires manual intervention.
Manufacturing POs arrive in every format imaginable. Some customers send clean digital PDFs. Others fax orders. Some send photographed handwritten forms. UiPath’s handwriting recognition only works on standardized forms with predictable layouts — not the real-world variety that manufacturing operations teams deal with daily.
Hugo Medel, EDI and AI Development Lead at ACS Industries, described the results: “Thanks to Lido, we’re processing approximately 400 weekly POs automatically with complete accuracy. We avoided a new hire and saved a chunk of money while reliably automating PO processing.”
The numbers tell the story:
If your manufacturing team is hitting the same walls ACS Industries did, here’s what matters in a replacement:
Lido takes a fundamentally different approach than UiPath. There’s no RPA platform, no robot licenses, no model training. You upload POs, describe what fields to extract, and get structured ERP-ready output.
Evaluating other enterprise tools for manufacturing? See how Lido compares to ABBYY for manufacturing. For general document processing comparisons, see our Nanonets and Super.AI alternatives.
ACS Industries migrated from UiPath to Lido in days, not months. There’s no data to move, no models to retrain, no RPA workflows to rebuild.
Lido’s pricing is transparent: $29 per month for 100 pages, $7,000 per year for 42,000 pages, and enterprise plans from $30,000 per year. Compare that to UiPath’s 60,000-page minimum bundle with opaque consumption-based pricing plus platform licensing.
Start with 50 free pages — no credit card required. Upload your actual POs, including the scanned ones and the handwritten ones, and see how accuracy and speed compare to what you’re getting from UiPath today.
Lido is the strongest UiPath alternative for manufacturing teams. ACS Industries, the world’s largest vertically integrated wire mesh manufacturer, switched from UiPath to Lido and now processes 400 POs per week automatically with complete accuracy, saving 30 hours per week. Lido works as a standalone tool without requiring an RPA platform, processes documents in seconds instead of minutes, and offers transparent pricing starting at $29 per month.
Manufacturing teams switch from UiPath because Document Understanding requires the full RPA platform (Studio, Orchestrator, robot licenses) just to process documents, takes approximately 1.5 minutes per page for digitization, has character confusion issues that cause ERP errors, and uses opaque consumption-based pricing with a 60,000-page minimum bundle. These limitations make it impractical for mid-market manufacturers processing POs, packing slips, and vendor documents at scale.
Lido achieves 99.5% to 100% accuracy on typed manufacturing documents, compared to UiPath’s approximately 10% failure rate on scanned PDFs and documented character confusion issues. Lido assigns confidence scores to each extracted field, routing uncertain entries to human review while high-confidence data flows through automatically. ACS Industries processes 400 POs per week through Lido with complete accuracy.
Switching from UiPath to Lido takes days, not months. There is no data to migrate, no models to retrain, and no RPA workflows to rebuild. ACS Industries completed their migration quickly because Lido works as a standalone tool. You upload documents, describe what fields to extract, and get structured output immediately. Lido offers 50 free pages with no credit card required to test with your actual manufacturing documents.
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