This sounds painful, but it also sounds fairly typical. Except usually such work is split between several different people/positions. No one thinks about it, b

This sounds painful, but it also sounds fairly typical. Except usually such work is split between several different people/positions. No one thinks about it, but one of the main reasons this kind of stuff stays manual is because the typical tools people are using to do it have no (good) integration points. Automating the entire process would require writing a large and complicated system. Automating parts of the process one step at a time is extremely difficult, because implementing most of the individual "steps" will require creating tons of complex integrations, and not result in any immediate productivity gains. Such incremental changes disrupt what people are currently doing and possibly create more stuff for them to do in the short run. For example: "Fill in all the blanks, remove brackets, etc." This is a perfect use case for machine learning or even a simple rule-based system. If you had all the data in one place, it probably would be trivial to automate. However, getting all the data from various systems, converting it to a standard representation, then converting fixed data to target formats and putting it into target systems is orders of magnitude more difficult than the actual corrections/changes.