How Century automates 50K BOLs and bookings monthly

After global shipping volumes shifted, Century Supply Chain Solutions needed to remove cost and manual effort from back-office operations while still responding faster to customers. CIO Jim McCullen and COO Ian Menear explored automation that could flex with real-world document variance instead of locking the business into brittle scripts.

Century had already felt the limits—and growing maintenance bill—of traditional RPA. The team needed automation that business experts could steer without standing up a dedicated development army.

Century needed a solution that could:

• Operate without a standing team of developers to change every edge case
• Adapt to high document variance across global shippers and customers
• Provide a clear audit trail of AI and human actions to meet SLAs and contractual obligations

Automating bills of lading

Kognitos worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Century’s Hong Kong operations team to automate two always-on processes: bills of lading (BOLs) and carrier bookings. Both flows involve challenging layouts—unstructured paragraphs beside rigid tables—exactly where template-driven tools struggle.

The BOL workload alone exceeded fifteen thousand documents every month, arriving in multiple languages and formats. After go-live, the platform learned each supplier’s layout, extracted the fields finance and operations care about, converted the data, and validated it against Great Plains. Capacity that had been trapped in manual keying returned to customer-facing work and faster audit cycles.