LOGO - LOGistics Operator

LOGO is a robot focused on automating the shipping process for companies in the logistics market. It extracts the sent shipping order as a pdf file by email and generates the financial information.

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Inspiration

During a weekly family meeting, a relative that works as a manager in a leader shipping company complains about the lack of automation in their market.

We did a research with different companies and discover that large companies have some kind of automatic process, but not the middle nor small companies of the transport market. These companies regret about how to deal with shipping companies orders to handle their deliveries. So far, they are typing the orders from the Shipping Companies and insert into the Logistics Software and the ERP. Even in some of them, there were two different teams and Logistics and Financials data are not linked in any way.

These results in multiple errors and people dedicated to check orders if the company do a high number of delivers per month. After some meetings with a transport company, they agreed to check automation with our prototype "Logo".

What it does

The customer uses a specific mail account for the communication with the Shipping Company. Every order is sent from the Shipping Company to this mail account with some information attached as a pdf document.

The information is extracted and used for multiple documents: for cargo, financials or transport legacy documents.

In the whole task, a log and process directories (processed, in progress or error) are used for tracking.

How we built it

Using Kryon as the core of the system, we create some scripts to build up the system:

  • First, we create a task to check the mail, if the mail is an order it is send to the Queue.
  • An Order Process Queue was programmed to help high load momentum. This queue has a structure to support task status for finished, pending or issued with errors actions.
  • Once the order has finished without errors, the information extracted is used to create API connections with the customer systems for the different procedures (logistics and ERPs). Some of them also required to create an Excel file for internal checking.

We use different technologies, for scripts mostly Python, like mail checking, pdf processing and log handling and vbs for some specific documents. Also communication with SAP was implemented to insert the Financial data.

Challenges we ran into

Technically the main challenge was pdf processing. It is tough to reach a satisfactory level of quality.

On the customer side, they were a bit apprehensive with the Automation Technology at the beginning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall the main goal achieved was to follow the whole process of identify the problem, create a useful system and set up for a particular market.

Automation Technology and systems like Kryon will change the way that companies run business. We are proud to be part of these development.

What we learned

We learn how to deal with an Automation problem from the beginning and testing the technical approach with different modules for a task, like mail checking or pdf reading.

Now we also have more expertise on how to show the technology to a customer and how to resolve the particular issues on a real installation.

What's next for LOGO - LOGistics Operator

We are planning to make a marketing campaign for similar companies that can meet the requirements for Logo. If the system continues to get good results, we hope it will become a value assert for our team.

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