Prior to the pandemic, the transportation industry was "famous" for its widespread use of paper documents, but the pandemic-accelerated adoption of technology pushes logistics providers to eliminate legacy systems and integrate digital solutions that streamline processes more than ever before.

One of our customers, a FCL / LCL (Full Container Load / Less than Container Load) freight forwarder, decided to tackle this issue. Let’s find out more.

The Pain Points

1. Data entry

Operations or accounting staff spend up to 2 to 4 hours of their daily working schedule to collect and verify documents, and then enter data into their ERP system. That is a huge amount of time!

In the transport & logistics industry, same as in many others, documents are being received in batches, sometimes even a 10+ page document. But in a large document there usually are several individual documents, of different types and categories. Our customer had to manually split them into separate documents.

2. Time

For shipping, documents had to be grouped by a certain field: for example, HBL and MBL, by HBL number. Our customer also had to manually match vendor invoices with customers’ orders and so on.

Once the documents were manually grouped, data had to be entered into the systems. 3 documents per hour was the average processing speed our customer was reaching if there were not encountered other specific problems during this processing.

3. Errors

The manual document processing is not only time consuming, but also very prone to human errors. Moreover, the correctness of the data is very important because the data entered and saved in systems like CargoWise, a tool especially designed for freight forwarders, cannot be deleted.

The Smart Approach

We guided and assisted our customer into designing a SmartFlow for its entire document lifecycle and embedding it in the current workflow. Apollo proved its magic, and the result was astonishing: efficiency increased 8 times.

Once ingested in the Apollo platform and using its AI features, our customers’ documents are split & classified, separated into individual entities: invoices, BOL (Bill of Landing), POD (Proof Of Delivery), transport orders from customers, contracts etc. After that, they are placed in their correct category, as decided by the customer. The rumours are true, yes: due to its AI engine, Apollo can extract and digitize data from any unstructured source, such as PDF, JPEG, PNG, XLS, DOCS and emails.

Apollo allows human-in-the-loop, which means that human operators can validate actions or make small adjustments in any moment of the process and as many times as the customer decides. This is where our customer decided to enter such human validations - before documents being automatically processed and grouped.

Thanks to its Machine Learning features, Apollo uses such human interventions and corrections for better training the data extractor. This is how we reach up to 99% accuracy.

Subsequently, the data are validated with the CargoWise database. The final step in the SmartFlow is to upload in CargoWise all the data and store files in pdf format.

The Benefits

Using Apollo, the most complex data capturing, processing & exchanging platform in Intelligent Document Processing, our customer was able to relieve its employees from repetitive, manual, physical tasks. This approach has allowed them to bring higher value, offering them the chance to have a true, much higher impact on the organization.

Revenue growth is also expected soon since our customer’s team can now focus on upselling and increasing volume from shippers.

Scaling-UP the business has never been so easy for our transport & logistics customer, as it can now attract & process more customers without increasing headcount. Additionally, the company no longer needs to spend money on employees’ recruitment, training, retention, selection, evaluation, selecting the right performance indicators or correcting the COPQ (cost of poor quality).