Challenge
The client is an intermediate company, they are a cargo and transportation company. In their day-to-day operations, they handle the load of various clients from departure to destination. Clients always send you a document in a standard format, which is what they present to the ports or customs where all the information about the cargo they carry is located.
That document may contain item information. The documents for each load can have one product or one hundred.
FCI has its own internal platform, they manually insert these documents, which became quite a tedious job, so they decided to automate that process and save several hours manually typing the documents on a daily basis.
Our solution
Rootstack experts immediately got to work. For FCI, a bot with UiPath was created, with the aim of reading the documents generated by clients, which they call settlements. The documents for reading can already come in digital formats for download, or scanned from their physical format.
FCI stopped processing manual documents on its platform thanks to the creation of the OCR Bot by the Rootstack team. To create it, they used an OCR from Amazon called Amazon Textract, which is a plugin that is available for UiPath. The OCR configuration was done and all the documents began to be read, thus obtaining the ability to read scanned or downloaded documents.
A normal OCR could only read the downloaded documents, with the OCR created by Rootstack, FCI got a bot capable of reading scanned documents that might be unreadable.
Amazon Textract was chosen because it is the most complete OCR and the one that offered the greatest support to the problem that FCI presented with its scanned documents and those with difficult visibility. For example, in a document with 10 products, the OCR reads them line by line and they are inserted into the FCI software.
The Amazon Textract was used with the community version of UiPath, this is free.
In addition to this, a function was developed to be aware of the possible failures of the Bot, which, when unable to process a document for some reason, immediately sends an email to the person or persons assigned to this process and so they are aware.
Technologies
UiPath is one of the most widely used tools for building RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, technologies and bots that help businesses speed up tedious processes and maximize productivity.
For its part, Amazon Textract "is a machine learning (ML) service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables", according to the definition on its official website.
