Rohlig Grindrod and nVisionIT have recently been awarded Hyland’s Most Innovative Solution of the Year at Hyland’s Partner Awards evening held at the Westcliff in Johannesburg.

This award recognises solutions built and implemented across all of Hyland’s partners in Sub-Saharan Africa and is testimony to the two organisations’ innovative partnership focussed on furthering Rohlig Grindrod on their digital transformation journey. The partnership aims to automate their processes, improve inefficiencies and ultimately, provide their customers with a better level of service.

The initial focus has been to digitize and automate RG’s freight forwarding and clearing process, specifically:

• Digital receiving and sorting of document packs related to a shipment
• Automation of quality assurance and approval
• Automated, integrated indexing of commercial invoice data into ShipShape in order to generate a bill of lading for customs clearance.

At the onset of the project, these manual processes were taking between 8 – 16 working hours to complete, depending on the size of the shipment. They were also prone to human error which would result in even longer delays.

Together, we implemented nVisionIT’s Freight Forwarding Automation solution built on Hyland’s OnBase and Brainware platforms to provide Rohlig Grindrod with an enterprise scale end to end content services solution spanning:

• Capture (automated indexing)
• Workflow
• Document Management
• Forms

Phase 1 of the solution covered Commercial Invoice processing for the Air, Sea, Road and Rail channels. A combination of Hyland’s OnBase and Brainware is used to process the document packs, OCR and extract metadata at a line item level and ultimately pass the information into ShipShape where the entries are captured for Customs Clearing.

We have observed a dramatic improvement in processing time, where the entire process is now averaging around 7 minutes regardless of the size of the commercial invoice. These invoices range from a single-page – single line document up to a multi-page – 1000+ line document.

Future phases of this automation journey will include:

• Shipping line invoice processing
• Product Code to Tariff Code matching at the Brainware Verification and Export steps
• Warehousing process, the processing of Packing Lists and matching to the processed invoices