In Max’s family business, the fleet of three company cars can still be managed by the company’s own office, but for a large company with several hundred vehicles, managing the company fleet is enormously time-consuming and outsourcing fleet management is certainly the more efficient solution. So that the customer can take care of the driving and hand over the tedious rest, i.e. the management of the entire company fleet, there are companies that do just that – fleet management including the management thanks to automated document processing of all incoming vehicle documents.
With several hundred company vehicles, fleet management quickly becomes a mammoth task and can hardly be managed in-house any more
Sheer number of different vehicle documents
Because one thing is clear: the vehicle documents that need to be processed are numerous on the one hand, and enormously varied in their forms and formats on the other. Let’s take a fleet management company as an example, which manages the vehicle fleet for ten customers. The customers each have between five and ten thousand vehicles distributed around the globe. That’s close to a hundred thousand vehicles, and documents are constantly being received for each of them, which means that the number of vehicle documents to be processed can quickly skyrocket into the seven- or eight-digit range. In addition, due to the worldwide locations of the vehicle documents, there are a number of deviations and country-specific regulations. A parking ticket, for example, does not look the same in Switzerland as it does in Brazil. The vehicle documents that the fleet management company collects and processes for its customers include the following:
- Vehicle registrations (registration for company cars, commercial vehicles, pool vehicles and others) for national and international registers
- Vehicle registration documents and their maintenance or renewal
- Driver’s licenses/licenses of drivers (so that no one is on the road without a license…)
- Traffic tickets (yes, they will definitely come in…)
- Fuel bills/fuel card management
- Upcoming dates for test bids, services, etc.
- General info about vehicle and driver
- and so on and so forth
Fleet management includes a lot of optimization opportunities for a company that should not be underestimated
In some cases, vehicle documents are received by the fleet management company electronically, but in most cases they are received by mail and in paper form. As a result, data from the documents must be manually entered into a system, which poses a problem for all workflows.
Intelligent, AI-based OCR as a game-changer for fleet management companies
Automated document capture as the first step
As a fleet management company, the crème de la crème is to be able to present all the data from the extracted vehicle documents to its customers on a silver platter. That means always giving the customer access to all data and information in real time. In order to be able to present this state of the art to the customer and at the same time make this profitable, from the fleet management company’s point of view it is first of all necessary to relieve the manual work processes. This happens during the capture and processing of the incoming vehicle documents described above.
The goal is clear: the radical minimization of manual work processes & towards automated ones on a large scale
Into the promising future with intelligent, AI-based OCR
The way and means to solve the problem are clear and must be as simple as possible to integrate into an existing ERP system. We are talking about the integration of intelligent, AI-based OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Thanks to this, in the future, the manual collection and entry of data from the various vehicle documents related to fleet management will finally be history. The intelligent, AI-based OCR automates any data capture and processing processes. Thus, vehicle documents are received by the fleet management company, in paper or electronic form, and are captured in an automated manner. The quality is improved in a first step, and then if necessary a page separation takes place. With classification, the documents are separated by type, for example, parking ticket, vehicle registration, inspection request, and so on and so forth. This is followed by the automated extraction of all relevant data from each individual document. In the next step, the structured output data is automatically sent to the relevant department, for example. Thanks to intelligent, AI-based OCR, customers can be offered detailed, real-time insights into their desired data online.
Phenomenal extraction quality from all documents – even those of weak quality and form
Intelligent, AI-based OCR makes the difference
This is exactly where intelligent, AI-based OCR makes a difference, twice over. It’s not just fleet management companies that benefit from intelligent document processing and thus automated work processes. Thanks to the accurate extraction of all relevant data with intelligent, AI-based OCR, significant optimizations can be made for company fleets in the future on the basis of this, and customers can always be given up-to-date insights into all the information they require. In more straightforward terms, this looks like this:
- All vehicle documents can be processed automatically, input errors are completely eliminated
- Fleet management companies increase productivity and efficiency
- Operating costs can be reduced, new time resources freed up
- Simpler and more effective communication with customers possible
- Always up-to-date insights into all relevant data for customers
