Kuehne + Nagel Canada

Background

With 46,000 employees and a global network of 830 offices in more than 100 countries, Kuehne + Nagel is one of the top three transportation companies in the world, providing sea-freight, airfreight, rail and road, and contract logistics. Based in Mississauga, Ontario, Kuehne + Nagel Canada is the first division to adopt customs invoice automation.

In the Customs Brokers arena, EDI (electronic data interchange) is the preferred method of receiving data, but the majority of data transactions that have to be ‘declared’ arrive as paper originals, faxes, scanned images or PDF files. Like most brokers, Kuehne + Nagel manually entered all ‘non-EDI’ data. However, with upwards of 60 part lines on a page and page counts ranging from one to 200 pages per document, data entry effort incorporated a significant use of labor.

The Challenge

In order to comply with Canadian Customs, every shipment into Canada must declare ‘all’ information related to every item shipped. That applies to all shipments by ship, rail or truck. In addition to “header data”, the detail part lines, which average between seven and 10 fields per line, are the most laborious.

A detail line can contain references to Product Codes, one or more descriptions, quantity, unit prices, line totals, country of origin, weights, tariffs/HS codes, PO numbers and/or many other unique field elements that relates to a shipper’s “declaration of goods.” The challenge is handling the widely varied formats of commercial invoices and their many pages of line items.

With its data entry staff at full capacity keying all the required data for Canadian Customs, Kuehne + Nagel was actually turning away business, because it could not deliver the appropriate documentation for additional shipments.

The Solution

Datacap reseller Applied Docs designed and installed a “Paper to EDI” system, built with Datacap Taskmaster, to reduce manual data entry and eliminate the bottleneck to additional business. The solution enables commercial invoices to be brought as scanned images or as PDFs into Datacap Taskmaster, which employs OCR and other technologies to locate and capture all the header/footer and line item detail field elements. It then parses the data to comply with Canada’s Pre Arrival Requirements.

Capturing line items is one of the strengths of Taskmaster and why its “Dynamic Details” feature is imperative to Kuehne + Nagel’s customs brokerage staff. When a new invoice layout is received, an operator can highlight the first line item on an invoice and indicate the column headers. With a single click, Taskmaster accurately captures all subsequent lines – even on multiple page invoices.

The bonus: Taskmaster “remembers” where the information was found for the next time the vendor’s documents arrive for processing. The operational environment of the
solution builds itself as data entry operators perform their regular work.

The Result

Data entry effort has been considerably reduced, and the work is now completed in a fraction of the time previously required. “The solution significantly cut manual entry time on customs invoices. With some internal system upgrades, we expect to reduce that time even further over manual methods,” said Charles Edwards, Kuehne + Nagel project manager. “The productivity gains add up to an absolutely incredible number. The business benefits are clear. We are able to accept far more work without additional resources.”

For more information, contact Datacap.