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Logistics

Streamlining Logistics Operations with Automation Technology

As competition in the logistics industry continues to increase, stakeholders must make strategic investments to stay ahead of the curve. Technology has emerged as a crucial factor in this effort, providing shippers and carriers with powerful capabilities to navigate the unpredictable freight market. Among these capabilities, automation stands out as a significant change. With the evolution of technology over time, automation has become an asset in the arsenal of logistics professionals, equipping them to better handle uncertainties and challenges. 

Thanks to technology, the process of invoice processing has become more error-free, providing greater transparency to customers, and enhancing their experience. Join us and discover how Cognine is tackling the significant challenges faced by industry players. 

About Client: 

Our client is a 3PL firm in the US focused on freight management solutions that arranges full truckload, expedited and LTL shipments for customers through its brokerage divisions. It provides customized transportation solutions for every size. 

Problem Statement:  

  • Client followed a manual process for invoice settlement. The process was repetitive, cumbersome and it involved interactions with multiple systems to fetch documents like PoD, BoL’s, Invoices, and delivery proofs. 
  • The amount must be fetched from these invoices and entered Salesforce portal, check for any variance as per the pre-agreed price and process the invoice. 
  • Client works with more than 50 carriers and the entire process was manually intensive, repetitive and error prone. 
  • Client also needed a solution to ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations by automating checks and validations to reduce the risk of noncompliance penalties.  
  • Client required a program to work around the clock, making it ideal for tasks that require constant attention. The program was expected to complete tasks much faster than humans, making the workflow efficient and cost-effective. 

    Solutions Provided by Cognine: 

    • Cognine started working with the client to implement an RPA solution that can streamline and automate time-consuming and repetitive operations like data entry, invoice processing, shipment tracking, and order management. 
    • Our team has identified an initial project within the invoice processing for one of the carriers and started documenting the manual as-is process. We have then implemented a POC to win the confidence of the client and to prove RPA is the ideal automation strategy. 
    • Unattended bots were implemented to automate certain tasks without any human intervention. These bots were programmed to complete a specific task or set of tasks, often in a repetitive manner. 
    • Based on the results from the POC, we have scaled up the implementation to other process like compliance and Manifest. Cognine has helped client automate 10+ processes across for more than 20 carriers. 
    • With the help of UiPath Orchestrator, we scheduled the execution of automated processes and monitored their progress, including detailed logs and analytics. 
    • Cognine introduced Semi Structured invoice data reading to be able to extract invoice data that was unstructured. We created around 5-6 rules to extract the exact amount. 

      Technology Used: 

      Results: 

      Conclusion: 

      • Automation increased the efficiency and streamlined operations by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, reducing the time required for order processing, inventory management, and shipping. 
      • Automated systems reduced the likelihood of errors and mistakes, leading to fewer shipping delays, fewer lost or damaged goods, and improved customer satisfaction and enhanced accuracy. 
      • Real-time visibility into inventory levels, shipping status, and other critical information, enabled the client to make data-driven decisions and improve their overall operations.

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      Finance

      Unleashing the potential of Digital Assistants in Fintech

      So, what’s the difference between Chatbots and Digital assistants?

      There are disruptive technologies that have positively impacted fintech, but none of them has revolutionized the financial world quite like smart AI, chatbots, and voice-enabled digital assistants. 

      In making key financial decisions, the presence of a digital assistant through conversational AI enhances customer intimacy while optimizing costs & revenue to a large extent.

      Digital assistants help FinTech companies to collect and process a large volume of information about customers’ needs, requirements, past transaction history, etc. They offer extremely personalised information about customers. With the detailed set of data, FinTech companies can easily amplify and automate operational performance.

      Functions like analytics, billing, collections, renewals, upselling, and cross-selling of services are automated and organised in such a way that the personnel can rely on the digital assistants completely.

      While both chatbots and digital assistants help in performing tasks as instructed and answering questions, chatbots are limited to making a conversation, making recommendations, and checking on statuses. 

      Digital assistants use AI to understand customers’ speech and text and have the ability to understand complex questions and even localized slang. Digital Assistants can also advise the right service or product to the consumer based on the customer’s emotional sentiment.

      Which digital assistant do I need?

      Adopting a digital assistant won’t solve all of your company’s problems or reduce expenditures. A crucial factor to take into account is redefining organizational process trouble spots, using a step-by-step analysis process, knowing what you need from your digital assistants, and tailoring them to meet those demands are the key points to consider.

      The best digital assistant for you will depend on your needs and the scorecard, which you should create. A custom-designed digital assistant might be the solution in many cases. 

      Increase the ROI:

      Digital Assistants bring a great ROI to any organization by cutting costs and time while providing great customer satisfaction. They also help in 

      Sales, marketing-offering new products and promoting new services, lead generation, and an overall reduction in the company costs and increase in ROI. Here is a brief comparison:

      Wrapping up

      Digital assistant technology is opening-up an overwhelming world of innovation, optimization, and opportunity. If you are lost in translating how this technology shift could open new opportunities and transform their business model, let us TALK!

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      Blog

      Intelligent Automation is the way of tomorrow. This can be a huge success if done correctly.

      Intelligent Automation is the way of tomorrow. This can be a huge success if done correctly. The key factors are the right people, process, and technology combined with an appropriate strategy. This intelligent application of machines helps to work smarter on tasks that humans could do themselves or hire outside contractors.

      Automation is a great way to save time and resources while improving your business. If you’re looking to automate your business, these 5 steps will help get it done:

      1. Start with a business strategy

      Automation tools should be your first stop when looking to automate processes. There are many different technologies that might help you achieve business goals and therefore, it’s important not just to look at just one strategy without considering other alternatives. They each have their own strengths, weaknesses, benefits or costs – so take some time here!

      IT needs to understand the problems that it has in order to buy tools. The business strategy is key to buying the right tools for your business to grow. Before making any purchases, C-level executives need to understand their company’s goals and how they hope to achieve them using technology; otherwise it might seem like there was no plan at all behind what you purchased!

      2. Focus on technology drivers

      IT leaders have a major decision to make about automation. The degree of priority that you assign will vary depending on its ability for success in the long term. Any technology strategy should not just advance the goals of your business but do so in a way that supports leadership’s long-term vision.

      3. Determine architecture

      The IT leader must first define the environment required to achieve desired goals within constraints. They should use guideposts or guardrails of technical principles as criteria for success, which might involve many technologies and processes in order to describe an ideal future-state architecture that relies on a variety staff from various teams throughout your organization

      The architecture should reflect any constraints on specific components- such as that they must be in the cloud or cannot be. Make sure that the design of your architecture reflects all constraints to avoid future headaches.

      4. Mind the gaps; build the roadmaps

      The next step is to evaluate what’s already in place and make sure it matches up with our desired automation end state. This includes identifying areas they need to address:

      For example requirement of any new technology, processes, training or identifying if existing ones can be used differently.

      At this step IT should develop the roadmap, taking into consideration the different factors that affect change, like automation strategy.

      5. Strategy Implementation

      IT should follow a consistent evaluation and selection process in doing so. The suitable automation technology ranges from tools to support more mature enterprise-grade scripting all the way up to low code platforms or even AI-powered robotic process automation. IT should decide what it wants for its company after careful thought about how much work needs to be done now vs future projects.

      While the strategy likely requires changes in processes, team structures, and staffing to implement it successfully – IT needs to work within existing HR frameworks for accomplishing these tasks. Additionally, training will be necessary so that employees can easily learn how their new tools operate with minimal confusion or risk of error when utilizing them at work

      Take Away

      Automate your way to a more streamlined and efficient operation. You can start by implementing automation technologies or finding opportunities in the workplace, such as automating certain processes that seem inefficiently executed but would benefit from the advances nonetheless!

      Let technology take care of some tasks so that you can focus on more important things. Let us take care of the technology at Cognine

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      Blog

      Intelligent Automation – Future of RPA

      Adoption of emerging technologies across industries is rising at a break neck speed. Besides digital transformation, organizations are pushing into digital optimization initiatives like Machine Learning, AI and automation to become more competitive, resilient and efficient.

      Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been one of the most successful and widely adopted automation tools. According to the latest forecast from Gartner, Global RPA software revenue is projected to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, an increase of 19.5% from 2020.

      Over the rest of the article, we will focus on how we help enterprises with:

      1. Facilitating RPA implementation

      Over time, having worked with various clients across the industries, one of the most important imperatives for successful RPA implementations has been management buy in.

      Getting started with RPA

      In this step, you will lay the foundation needed for successful RPA implementation. At the end of this phase, you would have a completed a pilot to show the benefits of implementation.

      Opportunity discovery

      We work closely with your teams to identify gaps, savings potential and ROI as compared to the peers and industry benchmarks. This includes data collation, workshops with your team and value stream mapping. Study data collated to confirm on the opportunities identified.

      Platform selection

      Once you have identified the opportunities for automation, the next step is to pilot the process. Having worked with leading automation software providers across the ecosystem, we help you identify the right tool for automating the identified opportunities. This includes considerations ranging from no code/low code platforms to cutting edge automation using computer vision, NLP and AI.

      POC execution

      Build automations, technical flows quickly for the identified automation opportunities. Collect the results, evaluate the feedback and build score cards to measure long term success and focus on creating an opportunity pipeline.

      Scaling across the enterprise

      To scale off on the back of successful pilots, organisations need a team responsible for opportunity pipeline creation, automation governance, process assessment and enterprise-wide support. This team ensures efficient usage of RPA resources, increased integration/access to new technologies with in the enterprise and increase in the throughput capacity.

      We work with you to build teams/capabilities to support continuous improvement, identify cross enterprise opportunities, help you reengineer the processes and track the results after deployment, to ensure you realize the full potential of your automation effort.

      2. Challenges and strategic navigation

      While RPA adoption has been gaining significant attention in some industries, there have been a plenty of failure stories too, exceeding the implementation time, cost and overall ROI. According to Gartner, “By 2021, 50% of RPA implementations will fail to deliver a sustainable ROI.”

      Below are some of the most common challenges you will likely face if you and your company choose to implement RPA.

      a. Process Issues

      It is recommended that you map your automation journey, identify gaps across various departments and saving potential before you set out on your automation journey. While most enterprise’s successfully implement pilots, they lack a clear opportunity pipeline to scale the efforts.

      Tasks that are repetitive, rules-based, high volume, and that do not require human judgement are the ideal candidates for automation using RPA. This can include activities involving moving files/folders, copy & paste data, scrape data from web, connect to the API’s, extract and process structured and semi-structured content from documents, PDFs, emails and forms. RPA implementation might be difficult with the process that are non-standardized and require significant human intervention.

      Redefining business process for efficient use of bot’s time or modifying the business process itself might speed up implementation. For example, it might prove to be efficient, if you could get all the data first, feed it into the application and then call the next flow instead of calling the next flow after every single data entry point.

      It is easier to reach automation levels off 70-80% for most applications and the remaining 20% might require significant investment of time and cost due to the complexity, throwing out the whole purpose of automation. Hence it is crucial to make a cutoff between desirable level of automation versus efficient level.

      b. Organizational pitfalls

      From getting the management buy-in, it is important to rally support from IT department to successfully execute RPA projects. IT department plays a crucial role in speeding the RPA implementations with resource allocation, exposing API’s or even building certain custom scripts over components. Some of the other IT support functions that play a key role include RDP access, network stability, bot run context and issue resolution time.

      c. Technical Issues

      It is advisable to choose low code/no code RPA solution over some the outdated solutions available in the market. It is easier for your internal teams to adopt or transition later, should you work with an outsourced service provider to develop the initial components. It also helps you keep the development costs under control.

      Some of the other best practices include:
      • Initialising certain applications before hand
      • Implementing best practices like modularity, re-usability and efficient looping into the code
      • Securing credentials using orchestrator

      d. Post implementation adoption

      Scalability, Maintenance and de-commissioning the process are the three most important post implementation challenges. We have covered scalability in the earlier part of the article (RPA centre of excellence is most important to address scalability). Changes in business processes or applications require the components to be modified. Since most the bots are programmed using best practices it is relatively easier to re-configure and change as per changing business needs. As the process evolves over a period of time with the changing business needs, we should also be able to analyse when to de-commission a certain process based on the complexity and effort it takes to maintain and bot’s run time.

      3. Future of RPA

      RPA market is expected to grow at double digit rates through 2024 as per predictions from Gartner. Here are the trends that are expected to shape up the RPA market in the short term.

      Non-IT Buyers/Low Code and No code Platforms

      The RPA adoption is over 90% in certain industries and most of these revenues has been coming from the IT buyers. Over the course of the time, business buyers are expected to drive the revenue growth for RPA players given the complex business landscapes and for simple reason there aren’t enough programmers around the world to meet these demands. By 2024, half the new RPA revenue is expected from non-IT buyers.

      While the existing pure play RPA leaders like Ui Path, Blue Prism & Automation Anywhere are working on simplifying their platforms, some of the tech giants like SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, Google and AWS are focusing on low code RPA platforms. There also has been some of the innovative starts ups that are already making some big success stories in the no code RPA space.

      Cognitive Automation

      Leveraging NLP, AI and ML with RPA enables enterprises to expand the scope of process it can automate. While some the tools provide these features by default, some of them may require custom coding or installing certain plugins from the RPA market place.

      Process Modelling Automation

      One of the top priorities for RPA research is auto-extraction of process knowledge from logs and videos. The workflow creation and process definition acts as a bottleneck in the creation of opportunity pipeline and is manually intensive. Automating the process modelling can speed up RPA implementation and deliver substantial ROI.

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      Healthcare

      RPA solutions for Revenue Cycle Management

      Client focus

      Client provides practice management services to independent physician-owned practices and small-mid size hospital groups. It offers end-to-end RCM services to manage its revenue cycle operations including patient registration, insurance verification, billing, and medical documentation.

       
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      person hours saved
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      bots in production
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      processes automated

      Challenges

      • The client wanted to automate certain processes across pre-authorization and patient medical record submission.
      • The pre-authorization process is highly repetitive and lot of manual effort was needed to get the patient details and check for status of authorization whether it is pending for approval, approved or declined.
      • Patient medical record submission was another painful task that involves a complicated process of getting the patient data from billing system, medical records from providers EHR system and then sending it to the Payer for claim settlement. This is cumbersome process involving multiple interactions with virtual and Citrix environments.

      Solutions

      • Cognine has implemented process automation using Blue Prism.
      • The bot automatically logs into the payer portal, feeds in the the patient data to get the latest information of claim status. The bot also extracts the information from hand written documents and feeds in the key information.
      • For the claim submission, the bot interacts with billing system eCinicalWorks, EHR system Cerner over virtual environments and extracts all the necessary information for filing a claim to the payer. From getting the data to updating the status in the billing system and interaction with EHR and printing the documents, the bots works un-interrupted with manual intervention.

      Key Benefits

      • Increased task completion rate, reduced error rate and highly efficient operations that cut down manual intervention to near zero which was earlier performed by 2 FTE.
      • Expansion of operations to multiple states and on-boarding more providers became much simpler.
      Categories
      Logistics

      RPA solutions for 3PL provider

      Client focus

      Client is a leading North American provider of logistics technology and transportation management services for manufacturers, retailers, chemical and consumer packaged goods companies.

      0 +
      persons hours saved
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      bots in production
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      processes automated
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      processes in pipeline for automation

      Challenges

      • The client had been experiencing steady growth over the last 5 years. However a key concern going forward was, how to grab new market opportunities fast enough and press the accelerator on future growth.
      • Manual processes across rate lookups, route optimization, audit logs, order management and several other areas served as biggest roadblocks in its pursuit for process excellence and future expansion plans.
      • The client’s management team has realized that technology intervention was needed to automate some of these repetitive mundane tasks across the above areas to increase customer satisfaction.

      Solutions

      • Cognine has started RPA implementation with 2 bots across order management, freight forwarding and rate look ups. The bulky, repetitive, rule based processes across these areas served to be an ideal candidates for automation.
      • Ui Path tool was chosen for its resilience and ability to perform in various environments and proven NLP capabilities.
      • The bots were responsible for handling the process of order creation (orders received by email –> involves NLP based text extraction) in the ERP system, getting rates from various freight forwarding companies and inserting in to the portal, and getting the latest status of the client’s customer shipments all with out manual intervention.

      Key Benefits

      • The RPA platform has increased the accuracy levels and cut the time needed to perform certain tasks by up to 90%.
      • The resources that were performing these manual tasks earlier are able to focus on other value adds to customers.