Solution Showcase - Shipping Invoice Extraction with Botminds AI - OptiSol

The shipping process is a critical part of the supply chain, and automating it with an AI platform can help improve efficiency and accuracy; and reduce complexities.

Challenges in Shipping Process Automation:

1. Lack of visibility amongst various entities in the supply chain
2. Delay in extracting freight-related information from invoices, shipping orders or from online portals
3. Higher lead time
4. Delay in responding to queries and customer dissatisfaction due to late deliveries
5. Inaccuracies in information extracted manually

Karthik Chandran (CK) is one of the founder directors of OptiSol, running the data analytics and machine learning team since 2017. One of their core areas of interest for OptiSol is parsing documents with unstructured data.  In CK’s words - “Not many processes can be automated from the source - so a lot of documents get created - handwritten and scanned - sitting in different formats, video formats, image formats.   The need is to parse those documents intelligently - extracting information from those documents - then use that extracted data for sending to downstream systems, automating the downstream processes. These are the core needs of customers across the globe and across different industries.  Here is a specific example of a customer scenario and the solution that we were able to offer to them on top of the Botminds AI platform.”

Video Transcript:

Note: The transcript has been edited for clarity.

This engagement is for a big shipping and logistics service providers in Australia. They serve 40+ shipping companies who are their clients.  Most of the shipping is done over shipping containers.  All the shipping-related delivery orders are shared as PDF documents of varying templates. And then they have a BPO team in the Philippines who manually open each of those documents and extract the information such as shipping route contents, the location of the container, the destination, the route, all the other specific key value pairs they have extracted. These are validated and made available to other downstream processes, that need to consume the data.

The OptiSol Data Labs team, in conjunction with Botminds' technical team, were able to put together a document parsing model. They trained a model around with 30 documents or so for a handful of templates. And then we were able to showcase ~98% accuracy in our extraction, for those sample documents that we were able to turn it around to the customer in a few days to a week. This is just the first page of a multi-page document - this is some of the data that the customer wanted to extract. This is a screenshot of the Botminds AI platform where you can see the data extracted on the right-hand side.

This is an interesting engagement for us. This is one of our first use cases using Botminds, we have used many other tools that we were able to evaluate on behalf of our customers. (We compared) Botminds accuracy and cost versus that of what other providers were able to provide. We found out that accuracy wise, Botminds is on par with any other data extraction services. And then on average, the cost of parsing these documents was 120% cheaper through Botminds than other service providers that we were evaluating for our customers.

There are a few other use cases that we are engaging with Botminds currently - such as passing checks. This is for a US customer where they still use a lot of checks.  India has moved on, but the US for some reason has not. So, the banking sector generates a lot of handwritten and scanned documents that then require check parsing; extracting information from the check like account number, check number, date, pay information amount and so on. It's an important use case for which we are coordinating with the Botminds technical team to provide a solution.

Another interesting use case for us is Information Redaction. Privacy being an important constraint or requirement for these companies in the US. They wanted to have an automated pipeline to redact PII - Personally Identifiable Information - from different documents that are involved in different business processes. We are working with our Botminds partner to put together a solution for our client for this.