Case Study
Import documents processing and archival
Customer Profile:
Manufacturing
Location:
US East
Requirements
- Receive customs broker documents and identify the sales orders associated with each border crossing document package
- Automatically identify and extract the invoices for customs brokerage services and freight contained in a customs brokerage package and process them for payment.
- Create a searchable database of border crossing documents that contains each sales order, import date, import number, and access to the original information package from the customs broker.
Solution:
- Simplify'd Intelligent Documents Platform with a custom workflow
Impact:
- 100% of customs brokerage documents processed automatically
- Automatic deconstructing and classification of documents to identify sales orders and invoices
- Automatic login of documents in database for compliance and archival purposes
Background
- Cross-border flows of goods generate a prodigious ammount of paper work, a typical truck crossing brokerage package contains upwards of 25 documents.
- For the importing company, receiving a customs brokerage package generally requires a person to open the attachments contained in an email, go through each attachment to identify what products are being imported, and also identify also the invoices for the brokerage services that need to be entered for payment.
- If the company is directly forwarding the goods to the final customer after crossing the border, it also needs to locate the date of import and signal to its ERP to issue an invoice to the final customer based on the import date.
Challenges
- Our client imports approximately 50% of its product from Mexico with some of its imports being directly forwarded to the end customer after import while others would be directed to a US warehouse to be consolidated with other items prior to final delivery.
- Additionally, the client may have full truckload shipments (i.e one sales order per truck), LTL shipments (more than one sales order per truck), and also cases when one sales order would require multiple trucks for shipment.
- Managing all this complexity without an automated tool required time and often resulted in difficulties ascertaining the crossing date for any given sales order during the annual audit
Solution
- The simplify'd Intelligent Documents Platform provided all the functionality required to automatically manage this process by defining a custom workflow for handling complex email attachments.
Engagement Model
- As an existing user of the IDP platform for processing AP invoices and Orders, we added the capabilities required by leveraging the platform's drag-and-drop capabilities to create custom workflows.
- Our noSQL database architecture allowed us to configure specific secondary indices to allow quick search capabilities for sales orders contained in each border crossing document
- Finally, our fornt-end team created a user portal to enable the customer personnel to query the database for specific sales order numbers and to download border crossing packages.
Results
- 100% automatic customs brokerage information packages processing
- 100% accuracy in retrieval of sales order import date and customs brokerage packages