Badly legible delivery bills, missing certificates, warehouse chaos due to sloppy stocktaking last year, and dissatisfied customers because of weeks-long delivery times: not conditions that a warehouse and logistics or transport company, a retailer or wholesaler, wants to deal with. Clean management of goods clearly looks different. This requires a holistic solution, because only with a well-thought-out system, an optimal structure, and automated processes can rock-solid goods management be achieved. Read this article to find out how intelligent, AI-based OCR (Optical Character Recognition) automates processes in goods management and makes a decisive contribution to the holistic solution.
Goods management 101: Use data wisely and – most importantly – use all the data available
Contrary to us humans, data wants to be exploited as much as possible. However, as long as this data remains largely unused as a result of manual processes, massive potential is wasted unnecessarily, with a view to process optimization in particular and performance in general. In goods management, this applies specifically to the following cases:
- The capture and processing of delivery bills, both for warehouse logistics and goods entry in the ERP system, as well as for transport companies that move goods for third parties
- The capture and processing of inventory documents
- The capture and processing of certificates of goods for their archiving
Individual manual processes in goods management bring the entire supply chain to a standstill
The main problems in goods management
If the processes described above are primarily done by humans, then it is hardly surprising that problems arise in goods management. Transferred again to the three examples above, the difficulties of manual processes look as follows:
- In warehouse logistics, when delivery bills are entered manually, they pass through countless hands, which can only lead to delays; in transportation companies that transport goods for third parties, the delivery bill with important details is of central importance and must also be attached later when invoicing is issued
- For companies that carry out the mandatory annual inventory with handwritten forms, checking and reconciling the inventory and individual items in this way, the chaos is practically set in stone
- In many industries, certificates are a constant companion of incoming goods or goods to be transported
In all cases, manual entry and processing of these documents in goods management result in slower processes, high error rates, and simply unused potential of the data that is actually available.
With the proposal for goods posting: the employee only needs to confirm or record any discrepancies
The solution in the form of intelligent, AI-based OCR
It takes the digitization of delivery bills, inventory receipts, and certificate slips to automate these processes, relieve employees of tedious work, and help the company overall. All documents are captured using intelligent, AI-based OCR. The intelligent OCR automatically captures all the data from the delivery bills, inventory receipts, and certificate slips and gives them a quality boost. This is followed by classification and automatic extraction of all relevant data by the OCR software. What remains is structured data, which is sent to the next responsible departments and employees – fully automatically.
Photograph the delivery bill with your smartphone camera and let the intelligent, AI-based OCR do the rest – no longer just a wish, but reality
Added value through intelligent, AI-based OCR
With the automated capture and processing by the intelligent, AI-based OCR, there are enormous advantages, on the one hand again broken down to the three examples of goods management, and on the other hand quite generally and across all industries:
- Logistics companies capture delivery bills digitally and, thanks to the fast data extraction, can receive a proposal for goods booking directly, only have to confirm it or, for example, can make the necessary adjustments one-to-one in the event of a discrepancy; transport companies benefit from the digitization of delivery bills and automated data extraction by always having all details about the transported goods at their fingertips in real-time (entire delivery history)
- In order to be able to carry out an efficient and as painless as possible inventory, the automated capture of inventory documents, especially in the case of individual documents, is ideal
- In the case of certificates, seamless and simultaneous archiving upon receipt is of significant importance in order to always have access to all data in the event of any problems
In addition, there are more general added values for the transport and logistics industry, which are achieved with automation through intelligent, AI-based OCR in goods management:
- Error-proneness decreases massively, employees are relieved and deployed elsewhere
- Up-to-dateness, for example in the form of certificates and a clean overview in warehouses in the form of inventory documents, are always available
- Overall performance of the company can be improved
