Python Automation & AWS Development

Automation Platform Saving $136K Annually for Market Research Firm

One of the region's largest readership surveys was buried under a 4-month manual data collection process requiring 80 staff members. We built a high-throughput automation platform with distributed web scraping and OCR on AWS, cutting the process down to 2 weeks and saving $136,000 annually.

The Challenge: 4-Month Manual Data Collection for 80 People

A major national readership survey tracking media consumption across thousands of publications faced a massive operational bottleneck. The facilitating research firm needed to collect circulation data from government databases, requiring 80 staff members working for 4 months, manually navigating websites, solving CAPTCHAs, and copying data into spreadsheets.

Critical issues included:

  • Massive labor costs: 80 people × 4 months = 320 person-months of manual work annually
  • CAPTCHA barriers: Government websites used image-based CAPTCHAs that blocked automated access
  • Inconsistent data quality: Manual data entry led to typos, formatting errors, and missing records
  • Slow throughput: Each record took 15-20 minutes to collect manually
  • No scalability: As the survey scope grew, costs would balloon proportionally

Key Takeaway from Challenge

When your core business process requires hundreds of person-months of manual labor, you're not just wasting money—you're creating a bottleneck that prevents growth. Automation isn't optional; it's survival.

Automate Your Data Collection

The Solution: Distributed Web Scraping & AI-Powered OCR on AWS

We architected and deployed a full-stack automation platform that combined distributed web scraping with AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) to handle CAPTCHAs and extract data at scale. The system ran on AWS infrastructure with intelligent queuing and error recovery.

Phase 1: Architecture & Infrastructure Setup

  • Designed distributed scraping architecture using Selenium Hub for parallel browser automation
  • Deployed on AWS EC2 with auto-scaling groups to handle peak loads
  • Set up S3 for data storage and CloudWatch for real-time monitoring and alerting
  • Built multi-threaded Python application achieving 50x performance improvement

Phase 2: CAPTCHA Solving with Advanced OCR

  • Integrated Tesseract and EasyOCR for dual-pass image recognition
  • Implemented preprocessing pipeline with contrast enhancement and noise reduction
  • Built confidence scoring system to automatically retry low-confidence CAPTCHAs
  • Achieved 97% accuracy in automated CAPTCHA solving

Phase 3: High-Throughput Data Extraction

  • Engineered intelligent queueing system to handle 4,000 records per hour
  • Built automatic retry logic for failed requests with exponential backoff
  • Created data validation layer to catch formatting errors before database insertion
  • Implemented progress tracking and resume-from-failure capabilities

Phase 4: Error Handling & Quality Assurance

  • Built comprehensive error logging with categorization (network, CAPTCHA, data validation)
  • Created admin dashboard for monitoring extraction progress and error rates
  • Implemented automated quality checks comparing extracted data against known patterns
  • Set up email alerts for critical failures requiring human intervention

Client Testimonial

"Engaging Siddharth for a critical software-automation project proved invaluable. He invested the time to understand our manual processes end-to-end and delivered a robust, efficient solution that saved us substantial time and resources. He's proactive, detail-oriented, and a fantastic collaborator. The communications and updates were very clear till the end, Siddharth is a fast executor, and equally strong on technical depth and business context. I recommend him without hesitation. Thanks again, Siddharth"

— Ranjit M., Head of Projects & Technology at Insight To Strategy

Verified on Upwork

The Results: $136K Saved, 87.5% Time Reduction, 97% Accuracy

The automation platform went live in February 2025 and immediately transformed operations:

  • $136,000 annual cost savings: Reduced from 320 person-months to 40 person-months of work
  • 87.5% time reduction: 4-month process completed in 2 weeks
  • 50x performance improvement: From ~4 records/hour manually to 4,000 records/hour automated
  • 97% data accuracy: OCR system matched or exceeded human accuracy for CAPTCHA solving
  • Zero manual CAPTCHA solving: Completely eliminated the most tedious bottleneck
  • Scalable infrastructure: System can now handle 10x more data without additional headcount
  • Reusable platform: Automation framework now deployed for other data collection projects

Key Takeaway from Results

Six-figure cost savings from a single automation project isn't unusual—it's the norm when you identify the right process to automate. The ROI on intelligent automation typically pays back in weeks, not years.

Discover Your Automation Opportunities

Technical Stack

  • Cloud Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch)
  • Web Automation: Selenium Hub, multi-threaded Python
  • OCR & Computer Vision: Tesseract, EasyOCR, PIL for image preprocessing
  • Data Processing: Python with async/await, message queues for distributed processing
  • Monitoring: CloudWatch alerts, custom admin dashboard

Ready to Automate Your Data-Intensive Workflows?

If you're burning hundreds of hours on manual data collection, web scraping, or document processing, we can build you a custom automation platform that runs 24/7 at a fraction of the cost.

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