It is amazing how the Supply Chain industry for all their prowess still relies heavily on paperwork.

From Air Waybill to Bill of Lading to Commercial Invoices etc., the amount of paperwork the industry is generating is incredible.

While digitization and digitalization is not new, the concept of data from single source is still somewhat a distant concept. There are many reasons why information owners might not want to share data but it does not mean we as supply chain users cannot get the data digitally.

The concept of digitizing paperwork is not new but yet the take up rate is not high. At Sanbo Intelligent Technology, we recognize that digitization and digitalization are important steps in making the supply chain more efficient through digital transformation.

Combining Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Sanbo develop our own Intelligent Character Recognition engine. In international transportation for general goods, three sets of documents are critical – B/L or AWB, Commercial Invoice and Packing List. With these three sets of documents, all the necessary information is present to be used for Customs Declaration, Freight booking, Warehouse operations etc.

In Shanghai, one of our customer uses our technology and platform to convert incoming documents and then distributing the resulting data to the Customs Declaration System, Warehouse Management System (for receiving), Sales System etc.

With the converted data, the platform is able to channel them to different applications. Take for instance export freight booking. Most customers still send freight bookings via emails with attachments of Commercial Invoice and Packing List. Traditionally, Customer Service agents will print these documents and manually enter the data into their freight management system.

The same set of documents are then sent to the Customs Declaration team who will go through the same process of printing the document and performing data entry into the Customs system.

At Sanbo, we aim to provide the solution to digitize the paperwork and to digitalize the process. With the paperwork digitized, we can host the converted data and then push them to the relevant applications.

There will be efficiency and productivity gains with such a process. Post-pandemic, hiring has become a challenge for most companies. When they can leverage on technology and remove the mundane tasks of data entry, the resulting manpower can be diverted to more value-added functions.

With digitization using our ICR, a simple Customs Declaration that used to take 20-30 minutes will take all of 2 minutes at most. What’s more, the data accuracy increases and the data may be shared with other apps.

With cross border trade, someone’s export is someone else’s import. Data sharing across border will result in faster and more efficient declaration process at the destination.

The main intention is to digitize the data at source and then reuse multiple times within the same supply chain.

Isn’t it time you look at upgrading? Visit us at https://sanbo.ai/ for more information and a free no obligation consultation.