Pas Cargo provides comprehensive transportation management solutions to customers in the Caribbean and Latin America region. PAS struggled with trying to expedite the processing of cargo coming into their Miami warehouse. Their team of agents would key-in data into their internal freight forwarding application for every package coming into our warehouse, prior to dispatch to the customers across the Caribbean and Latin American region.This activity took the agents took an average of 5 min to process each label, with a volume of 500 to 1000 labels per day depending on the time of year. During peak package volume periods such as during the Christmas season, the agents would struggle to keep up with the volumes. This created a bottleneck in the delivery operations.The resulting impact was increased delivery lead times, significant over-time, employee high stress levels and, ultimately dissatisfied and angry customers.
The Solution
The POC took about 5 weeks from sign-off of the Process Design Documents to full implementation. An essential requirement of the design was to ensure the Bot could obtain package label information from the warehouse as packages can in to then be forwarded out to the customer. This presented the first challenge for the Valenta team – how to capture content for the Bot to process without human intervention supporting the process. The Valenta team leveraged UiPath’s RPA software as part of the solution to address the ‘physical presence challenge.’ Using the RPA software, a picture of the label was taken for every package coming into our warehouse. This picture was then uploaded into a folder from which the Bot would commence processing. The RPA Bot would then extract required data from the picture (customer name, supplier name, shipper name, package weight, package dimensions) and enter the information into the freight forwarding application.
The Proof of Concept
Valenta was engaged to provide an RPA managed service to automate all incoming package processing within the PAS Trinidad warehouse. Responding to the business objectives of improving processing speed for incoming packages and improving the overall customer experience, the Valenta team defined three design principles to anchor the solution development:
- Speed of delivery
- Improved accuracy
- Process efficiencies that get packages to customers quicker