Document Processing
Data Reconciliation
Top consumer retailers like Amazon, Abecrombie and Fitch, and other major players rely on the work and technology of Century Supply Chain Solutions, a global logistics and supply chain service provider that focuses heavily on integrating advanced technology to enhance its offerings. Century provides a wide range of services, including origin cargo management, e-commerce fulfillment, customs brokerage, domestic freight management, and end-to-end supply chain optimization. They have a significant global presence with offices and warehouses strategically located worldwide, ensuring efficient logistics and supply chain operations for Fortune 100 companies, North American retailers, and other major clients.
Their proprietary platform, VIZIV, utilizes predictive AI to provide comprehensive visibility and real-time management capabilities across the entire supply chain, enabling their clients to achieve high levels of flexibility and optimization.
The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, paired with a highly competitive market, resulted in a downturn in the volume of items shipped globally. Century’s CIO Jim McCullen and COO Ian Menear, looked for ways to reduce costs across operations while still improving responsiveness to customers’ needs. A tech-forward firm, Century engaged explored with Kognitos to explore how to optimize back office business processes, particularly in the back office after experiencing the limitations and growing costs associated with robotics process automation (RPA). Century needed a solution that didn’t require a team of developers, was flexible enough to accommodate the high degree of document variance across their many global shippers and customers, and would provide a detailed audit trail of AI and human activity to ensure SLAs and other contractual obligations were met.
Kognitos worked closely with Century’s Hong -Kong team to automate two high-volume, business-critical, and 24/7 operational processes: bill of lading (BoL) and carrier booking. Both processes entail processing challenging documents and data formats, with high degrees of unstructured and tabled data.
The BoL process involved more than 15,000 monthly bills in many different languages and formats. As one can imagine, processing this volume required a significant amount of human labor and expertise. After implementing Kognitos, the platform learned each supplier’s document format, extracted the data, and then converted and validated it against Great Plains data. As a result, Century has been able to offer services to more customers and perform audits in much less time by returning significant human capacity back to the business.
The carrier booking process is driven by a volume of more than 50,000 emails per month, containing essential confirmed booking information. The processing of bookings may be subject to stringent service level agreements (SLA). Kognitos worked with Century to transform their carrier booking process, resulting in reduced mis-routings and delayed shipments. The new process also allowed their team to respond to carrier changes with ease, and provide a higher level of service to their customers.
Kognitos uses AI that enables business users to teach the system how to read new or updated document formats, ensuring that the process advances and grows more automated as it encounters new exceptions.
With Kognitos, Century is able to handle a greater degree of volume and customer orders while maintaining consistent staffing levels. Additionally, Century is able to bring some previously outsourced services back in- house, providing greater control and visibility into processes for further optimization. The serverless nature of Kognitos enables Century to respond to customer demand in real-time, accommodating peaks without having software on the shelf, and without the need for complex orchestration.
By using AI, Century is reducing costs, error rates, and re-work, enabling staff in the Hong Kong office to focus on higher value added activities, and creating a system of record of all activities for process optimization and customer management. Building on this success, Century aims to use Kognitos more broadly across the organization, including in areas throughout the finance and accounting value chains. When the market—and shipping volumes—heat back up, Century is now positioned to scale dynamically.
Document Processing
Data Reconciliation
