Pitt Ohio, a premier Mid-Atlantic LTL (Less Than Truckload) carrier, uses Kapow to automate web data extraction and integration for supply chain, customer service, credit and collection process automation.
Process Automation Solution:
Logistics and Transportation
Automate manual processes to improve margins and accelerate business
Manual processes dominate many aspects of transportation and third party logistics (3PL), which keeps costs high and slows growth. Automating with Kapow Software can reduce labor costs as much as 95% and allow staff to manage by exception.
Kapow Katalyst's integration capabilities allow you to update the B2B portals increasingly required by your trading partners without needing any manual effort at all. You can integrate your transportation management system (TMS) with the portals of shippers, carriers, and vendors by creating APIs for them–and even create EDI records from the data on a B2B portal.
Featured Customer Success Stories in Supply Chain Optimization:
Challenge
- Integrating with supply chain and customer applications was difficult.
- Typically, this was accomplished with repetitive manual tasks that consumed valuable resources.
- Data collected in this manner resulted in numerous keystroke errors and was hours or days old, limiting relevance.
Solution
- Kapow has automated web intelligence and integration in various parts of the business, ranging from supply chain and customer service to credit and collections.
Results
- Eliminating manual data extraction, frees resources to work on more value-added projects.
- Better data quality and timeliness.
- Access to more data sources.
JB Hunt, one of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America, keeps trucks running at capacity by harnessing real-time web data with Kapow.
Challenge
- Reduce freight costs by filling all trucks on all routes to capacity.
- To achieve this goal, they needed real-time access to relevant information from diverse sources, including logistic and payment information, but access to secure/external databases was seemingly impossible.
Solution
- Kapow web intelligence robots enable them to monitor public and partner websites for freight bid information in real time.
- They can integrate data from hundreds of partners and companies within a complex value chain.
- Data flows are integrated using web application interfaces. This eliminates the need for manual copy and paste between systems.
- The solution provides mobile access to application data, crucial for a transportation company.
Results
- More trucks are running with full loads, reducing freight cost per mile.
- Automating data integration has reduced cost (and errors) associated with manual data entry.
- Real-time visibility into partner logistics drives increased margin, revenue and customer satisfaction.
- CFO has a real-time view of cash flow.
Trinity Logistics, a top-20 U.S. provider, offers a full range of logistics services that includes full truckload, LTL, intermodal, and freight management. Like all 3PLs, Trinity Logistics creates logistics solutions designed especially for each client - which requires integration with the IT systems of the shippers, carriers, and service providers that form each client's unique solution.
Challenge
- Several disparate systems without APIs
- Staff manually keying transactions and copying data from multiple systems
- Traditional approach was expensive, time consuming and creates dependencies when things break or change
Solution
- Kapow Katalyst automatically accesses the carrier website to capture each shipment's PRO number, Bill of Lading, carrier invoice and other documents, track/trace information and invoice amount, and integrates the data into Trinity’s operating system
- Documents are moved directly into Trinity's OCR subsystem, eliminating the manual scanning of PDF documents by converting them into a scanner-friendly format.
- Katalyst then integrates with Trinity's operating system to validate this data - if a discrepancy is detected, an exception be raised for manual review.
Results
- Expects to double in volume of transactions by 2015 with only 20% increase in staff
- Drove efficiencies throughout the company by eliminating non-value added 'touches' and manual processes
NetApp creates innovative storage systems and software solutions that help customers around the world store, manage, protect and retain one of their most precious corporate assets – their data. With annual revenues reaching $5 billion, NetApp employs over 10,000 employees worldwide.
Challenge
- They had new and legacy content residing in distributed repositories across the organization in internal and external knowledge-bases, support sites, bugs databases etc
- All the content – structured, semi-structured and unstructured data without meta-data, needed to be indexed and mapped to a standard taxonomy and controlled vocabulary for improved Search results relevance.
Solution
- Handle forms-based SSO authentication requiring JavaScript execution
- Standardize extraction technology across different content source types (web, SaaS, SQL/databases, etc)
- Add, enhance, transform, normalize metadata across new and legacy content
Results
- NetApp was able to sync content between multiple systems.
- With platform independence, the team was able to surface content from any platform to their Support portal regardless of where content owners developed the content.