The problem
A premier water logistics company used a 3rd-party system for record maintenance to manually enter paper tickets collected from truck drivers after deliveries. The process to go from paper ticket to billing was cumbersome. The driver would stop at a small building, enter information from a paper ticket into a computer and place the paper ticket in a box. Those paper tickets were then collected at the end of the week, scanned and emailed to the 3rd party vendor to transcribe and enter the tickets into that company’s system. The water logistics company then had to extract that information from the other company’s system to invoice its customers through NetSuite.
The Blueprint Way
Rather than use an outside company, Blueprint created a system that had a water logistics employee scan and send the field tickets to a company e-mail address inside Azure or Microsoft 365. This triggered running the images of the tickets through Azure Cognitive Services, which created metadata for each image that was used to marry the image with the data entered by the truck drivers. For unmatched files, Blueprint built a web app that showed any unmatched images and digitized data from the truck drivers that could then be manually matched.
“Even if they had to manually match every ticket, it is still going to be cheaper for them than manually entering information from every ticket, which is what they were paying someone to do,” one developer on the team explained.
While what Blueprint was asked to do was make that process of supplying data to NetSuite more efficient, come to find out, that data could not actually be integrated into NetSuite. What the water logistics company really needed was an invoice for its customers with the field tickets attached.
“Now they have a paper ticket that goes all the way into the ERP as an invoice with a digital image of that piece of paper attached so they can send it to their customer. We took a process that was not end-to-end and not only did we reduce the amount of boxes in the middle, we actually made it end-to-end.”
In sticking with our Blueprint philosophy, the team built the integration paths into NetSuite and built a system that generates PDFs with all relevant field ticket images for any invoice created in NetSuite.
