Why should supply chains consider automation?

Simple. Customer Satisfaction.

Customers are demanding their orders more immediately than ever before. Without automation, keeping up with the demands of your customers can drive customers to shop from your competitors.

If the ordering/purchasing process is slow, painful or worse; customer may not receive their orders leading to more bad customer relationships and furthering their justification to shop elsewhere.

Get ahead of the curve.

Automating your inventory management workflows involves more than flipping a switch. You must consider and connect all the incoming documents, databases and underlying software that support the supply chain framework.

But how?

Can you answer this question? Is there one piece of data or identifier that your drivers and warehouse teams use to link a shipment before it departs home and until the final receipt is created? If not, this exercise will be helpful in helping your team in establishing that link.

A manufacturing inventory process generally consists of the following five steps:

1. Parts and Materials are ordered through a purchasing department.
2. The parts and materials are then delivered to the warehouse as raw materials and placed in stock areas.
3. Parts are pulled from stock and moved to production facilities to be made into finished products.
4. The finished goods are put into inventory for sale either at a warehouse or through a distribution chain.
5. Finally, the products are shipped to resellers or customers through the sales process.

Basics of Inventory Management Video

Inventory management tracks a variety of data as goods move through the shipping process

• Lot numbers
• Serial numbers
• Cost of goods
• Quantity of goods
• Dates that the goods reach each step in the process

Manual ways of tracking these items in a spreadsheet is a significantly complex process which automation has been improved with the application of software. By connecting disparate systems, companies may be using; ERP’s, Accounting, Inventory, etc. the supply chain gains insight into inventory, thus keeping the right amount of goods on hand at all times, while staying profitable.

These systems keep track of goods in inventory, sometimes across several warehouse locations. Inventory management software can also be used to calculate costs — often in multiple currencies — so that accounting systems always have an accurate assessment of the value of the goods.

Accounting for Multiple Currencies

International suppliers will each have their individual currencies which will need to be reconciled and converted to your company’s currency. Manual conversion for each incoming shipping pallet is one of the mundane tasks that can be taken off the hands of your already busy data entry staff in the Accounts Payable department. ABBYY FlexiCapture recognizes the currency based on the country which packing documents originate, and handle the conversion automatically so your team doesn’t have to. Take a look at how easy the configuration is to handle international currencies – it is literally a click of a couple buttons to set this up in the beginning so your team can be hands off until an exception is reached.

What Can ABBYY Do For Digital Transformation in Logistics?

What makes ABBYY FlexiCapture stand out from other document capture software on the market is the exceptional flexibility, superior accuracy and transparency of its technology – three qualities that drive the development of our transformative software. Powerful ABBYY FlexiCapture technology can:

• Automatically process different kinds of documents in a single stream
• Accurately classify documents
• Extract data from complex multi-page documents with continuous tables
• Provide good-quality data from even poor-quality documents, such as faxes

See a customer story about how one company improved their logistics processes with ABBYY in this case study video:

Watch This Case Study on Logistics Automation by ABBYY

We invite you to reach out to our team for a demo ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices. We can share pricing and consult with you on how to best implement your automation project so you can begin weighing whether it really is worth manually keying those fields each time you have an incoming shipment.