The task to be solved within our core research was the design and development of a document analysis toolbox covering typical document analysis tasks such as document understanding, information extraction and textrecognition. In order to prove feasibility of our concepts, we have developed the prototypical analysis system OfficeMAID. The system analyzes documents, as used in the daily work of a purchasing department, by a-priori knowledge about workflows and document features. In this way the system provides goal-directed information extraction, shallow understanding and process identification for given documents (paper,fax,e-mail).