The Logistics and Transportation Industry is a document and process-intensive industry, which demands immense coordination between various processes and correlation of data from several documents. ‘Documents,’ ‘Paperwork,’ ‘Approvals,’ ‘Forms,’ ‘Invoices’ are terms that everyone working in the Logistics Industry hears every day.
Data extraction from documents plays a vital role in Customs Clearance processes in the Logistics and Transportation industry, and there is a growing demand for document automation solutions.
Customs Clearance is a process that facilitates the movement of goods in and out of a country. Through this process, logistics companies keep the country’s trade and excise departments updated on the goods that are being imported/exported, helping the government assess the country’s trade with other countries.
Logistics companies must fill out a customs declaration form (the form’s name varies from country to country) with detailed information about when, where, what, and how the goods are imported/exported. Goods are not permitted to enter the country without the approval of these declaration forms.
These forms must be filled out on the government portal 24–72 hours (varies from country to country) before the goods reach the country; otherwise, logistics companies will face huge penalties, making the on-schedule filling of forms a critical factor in the customs clearance process.
The Customs Clearance forms and portals vary from country to country. For example, in the US — CBP (Customs and Border Protection) Form and U.S Customs and Border Protection portal, in India — Bill of Entry and the Ice Gate portal, in the UK — C88/C21 form and Gov.UK portal, are used.
For example, when a car manufacturing company imports engines and fails to clear customs on time, the production of hundreds of cars is halted. This delay in supplying cars to the market will decrease their overall sales revenue and negatively affect their profits. The company now incurs a loss in revenue and the added cost of paying the penalty to the Customs Clearance Department.
When the exporter ships the goods via air freight, the importer has a short span of time to fill in the Customs Clearance documents as goods arrive in the country within the next few hours. Often, the exporters notify the importers about the shipment at the time of shipment and not in advance.
This situation puts the importer in a quandary. Importers now have limited time to gather all shipment documents, images, and pdf attached either to various e-mails from the exporter or in the importer’s internal database, look for relevant information from these documents then fill out the customs clearance forms.
Consider a similar situation in the car manufacturing company, the customs clearance team looks for all the documents/images/PDF that were shared between the vendor and the company via mail, contact the company’s purchase department to get all the invoices related to that order, look up for vendor information in their internal vendor database or perform similar activities to gather information.
This process is tedious, time-consuming, inefficient, and is prone to manual error, as, with such a time crunch, employees tend to enter incorrect data onto these forms.
Companies spend hundreds of work hours finding the correct documents, looking for relevant data, and filling out these forms. Despite this, companies are may end up to paying huge penalties due to incomplete entries, rework, and delays.
Machine Learning (ML), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) models make it possible to automate such processes, drastically reduce the number of manual hours spent, avoid human error, and make these processes 10x faster. They improve the efficiency of these processes and bring massive changes to the way industries currently handle documents.
For impactful results, the models must be trained with a large subset of data for industry process-specific reconciliation purposes. Logistics documents vary wildly in form and content, which makes the normalization of document data challenging.
All textual and pictorial information from these documents is read, understood, and is extracted into a database. Extracted data from various documents is correlated, and only unique values are stored, which prevents redundancy/repetition of data.
The stored data is now usable and can be ‘Searched’ using keywords related to the required information. All instances of the related information from all relevant documents can be located using Search. This information can be shared as CSV, JSON, or instrumented for other applications through standard REST APi.
Once a logistics company has automated their document process for the Customs Clearance process, all the documents can be uploaded in a single place, read, understood, and stored in one place (database). Users can now search the database with relevant keywords to that shipment, copy and paste the required information in the Customs Clearance documents.
By automating using AI, ML & OCR technologies, companies can
1. Make their processes efficient: The process of finding relevant information and filling in customs clearance forms can be made faster
2. Reduce human error: Filling in forms with incorrect data can be avoided
3. Avoid penalties: On-time filling in customs clearance documents can be enabled, which will in turn help in avoiding huge warehousing and storage fees
4. Reduce human resource costs: Several tasks that are carried out manually can be eliminated by implementing various technologies
5. Track shipments: Information about shipments can be collated and shipments can be tracked in one place
6. Structure their overall customer clearance process
Why ThirdRayAI?
ThirdRayAI platform is purpose-built to automate the process of extracting and structuring information from documents and making them available for business applications. ThirdRayAI applies AI and ML to extract information from documents and automate workflows for business processes such as the Customs Clearance process.
ThirdRayAI can also find a wide array of applications in various other processes in the Logistics Industry, like collating time sheets, tracking orders, maintaining Vendor, and Supplier databases, etc.
Contact us (success@thirdray.ai) to know how ThirdRayAI, with the help of AI, ML, OCR, and automation, plays a vital role in transforming businesses.
Made with
No Code Website Builder
