Intelligent Document Solution Provides Visibility for Delivery Operation

The direct sales company, Marketing Personal, has optimized its process of delivering orders using DocuWare, Summan DataVar, ABBYY Flexicapture, and Splunk. This integrated solution provides control over the entire logistics operation within a single data center, improving the quality of servicefor the sales team and their customers, providing timely information about delivered orders and monitoring new ones.

Marketing Personal (MP) is a Latin American multinational company with a presence in Colombia and Panama, offering direct salesby catalog for clothing, footwear, cosmetics, and homewares. It focuses on fashion and innovation, offering a new catalog every 21 days (with more than a thousand products) to more than 100,000 Image Advisors who run their own businesses by selling Marketing Personal’s products.

In the last two years, Marketing Personalhas more than doubled its sales income; in 2013 it achieved a sales income of over US $100 million, in 2014 US $190 million, and in 2015 over US $300 million.

Requirements

The ordersand rewards are shippedfrom Marketing Personal to various destinationsthroughout Colombia, through a network of carriers who are responsible for transport and door-to-door delivery of the products.

The operations team administers new orders, as well as managing issues relating to package deliveries and responding toinquiries and claims made by Advisors regarding their orders. Tracking the logistics process was very complex, and the shipping costs invoiced to Marketing Personalby the delivery carriers did not reflect effective monitoring of deliveries and inquiries to customers.

The Marketing Personal’s Customer Service Department did not have clear and timely information aboutthe various phases of delivery so they could not give suitable responses to delivery inquiries. They had to rely on projected delivery information and paper documents from the operations team.

The documents generated during the transport operation must be stored for several years as they may be required as proof of delivery for payments and may be needed for potential future legal processes. There are risks associated with processing transport documents where they are exposed to potential damage or loss due to physical handling and their return from various regions of the country.

Solution

Currently, each transport document is generated by the Summan DataVar print service and contains a survey for recipients to complete upon delivery. This transport document is physically printed and sent with the orders and rewards. A digital version of the documents is stored in DocuWare, the document management software, for subsequent consultation and checking.

Once the orders have been delivered and the transport surveys completed by the customers, they are scanned by the carriers and the images are sent to a server in Medellin. There the intelligent data capture software, ABBYY FlexiCapture, reads each document delivering the data captured from the survey to the operational intelligence software, Splunk, and stores the processed documents in a pre-defined directory on the server. DocuWare monitors the pre-defined directory and automatically sends any files stored there to the corresponding file cabinet, cross-checking the data in the document against the transport documents already in the system. The operational intelligence software, Splunk, creates a graphic representation of the data delivered by the intelligent data capture software, ABBYY FlexiCapture, and the images stored in DocuWare, allowing new orders to be checked, including those pending for delivery.

Benefits

Thecustomer service staff now have real-time information about each order and can see the various documents involved in each transaction, allowing the staff to immediately respond to customer requestsor to other departments.

The operations team has better control over the various stages of the order and reward delivery documents, so they can better monitor deliveries and track new orders.

The integrated solution generates accurate measurementsof delivery times by each carrier/region of the country. Today, Marketing Personal improved the quality of service for its sales team and customers with timely information about the orders delivered and monitoring of new orders.

The solution also allows the workflow of each of the different carriers to be planned, depending on the services provided. It improves the output and efficiency of the various functions of Marketing Personal, generating benefits and optimizing resources.

Conclusion

Luis Alejandro Múnera Santos, Director of External Logistics at Marketing Personal S.A., said: "The transport process at Marketing Personal is characterized by a wide network of independent carriers with different kinds of structures and levels of development as providers. We need good information and control systems to administer this diversity. In addition, the growth in the level of sales and orders has generated the need for powerful, versatile, and efficient tools to manage the logistics cycle as a whole. Marketing Personal has a significant advantage in its transport and distribution network. The assets we have developed over a number of years are now being strengthened with the use of integrated solutions such as DataVar, DocuWare, ABBYY FlexiCapture, and Splunk. The next step is to continue developing this transport network and improving the service efficiency and satisfaction of our end users."

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Tasks

• Gain theability to track items sent and gain access to delivery documents in real time
• Develop secure, long-term document storage
• Improve customer service and response times

Benefits

• Timely information allows better customer service
• Each carrier and delivery zone is measured by a performance and service evaluation
• The company has saved time and money with effective control of the order delivery process
• Secure transport documents eliminate the risk of loss or damage

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