De Rijke saves valuable time and money with Ephesoft
Time to input orders
Time to onboard customers
More accuracy
Customer: De Rijke, Netherlands
Industry: Transportation & Logistics
Application: Order Management
Partners: Nokavision
The challenge
In hardly any other industry does the principle “time is money” apply as accurately as in logistics. The logistic service provider De Rijke is acutely aware of this in its day-to-day operations. The company handles amongst others large quantities of storage and transport orders that need to be processed daily. With the larger customers, various types of EDI-setups are in place, but other customers send orders that need manually order entry into the planning systems at De Rijke.
De Rijke wanted to increase productivity, relieve teams of manual tasks, reduce error rates and generally speed up processes. The goal: a digital order management system in which all documents are automatically read, processed, validated and checked, ensuring continued maximum flexibility for customers in ways to send orders. A high proportion of orders still reach the team by email or as PDF attachments. With the previous system, the onboarding of new customers could take up to five days – far too long for a fast-moving logistics company. A solution was needed that would automate tasks from the start to enable fast customer onboarding.
The solution
As a long-standing partner, Nokavision advises De Rijke on various digital issues and suggested Ephesoft’s Transact solution for the automated processing of documents. Using the low-code development platform Mendix, the company developed an end-to-end process through which incoming PDF orders read and decoded by Ephesoft Transact are automatically transferred to De Rijke’s OMS (Order Management System). This eliminates manual entries that were previously so time-consuming. Now, only PDF orders that fail – due to certain quality standards, or those that do not meet validation requirements, for example – still have to be processed by staff. Those obstacles are identified by the system’s Smart Rules Engine.
This evaluation is made possible due to Ephesoft Transact’s ability to read all entered documents accurately and transfer information seamlessly. Ephesoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology enables De Rijke to automate manual data entry. This reduces error rates to a minimum, relieves staff of administrative tasks and increases the efficiency of the entire process. Through a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the solution captures, classifies and extracts all relevant information from submitted PDF documents. After a short learning process with minimal sample data, the system is fully operational and works smoothly and error-free.
Ephesoft’s AI and OCR powered solution enables the implementation of more streamlined workflows for faster data capture and processing which reduces processing times when onboarding new customers. In addition, compliant data processing, the elimination of transmission errors and the associated elimination of follow-up costs are also achieved. Company and person-specific data records are integrated automatically, quickly and accurately into company processes.
Results
In the initial trial, the delivered templates could be used with Ephesoft Transact within four hours – where previous methods would have taken up to five days. Within nine months, Nokavision implemented the entire project for De Rijke and ensured that the logistics service provider was able to reduce the time taken for order entry from three minutes to 40 seconds, achieving an accuracy of 99.9 %.
Significant cost reduction through automation and minimisation of manual work
Able to expand services and scale the business
