Bill of lading audits
Order processing
Brown Integrated Logistics is a full-service logistics company that offers dedicated and regional truckload services, warehousing, brokerage, and maintenance. Brown's trucking business focuses on the country's Southeast region but provides warehousing and brokerage services nationwide.
Todd Hahn is the Vice President (VP) of Process Improvement & Management at Brown. In his current role, he identifies commonalities with needs across organizations and workflows. Having worked for Brown for over a decade in analysis and trucking, he knew the company needed a better automation solution. Brown used robotic process automation (RPA) tools in the past; however, the inflexibility of the product was always an issue. They need to be agile in the logistics space and constantly require modifications. Instead of starting from scratch every time, which is not realistic or cost-effective, they need a flexible solution that adapts to their changing needs.
Todd’s role at Brown is to find new and improved approaches to processes to increase efficiencies throughout the company. Although the trucking industry is historically slow to adopt new technology, Todd’s objective is to show stakeholders what’s possible.
Having researched various RPA tools, Todd landed on Kognitos as the best solution. Kognitos, being in the cloud, made it easy to adopt and use with Brown’s different operating systems.
Brown’s main goal with Kognitos was to extract data from customer bills of lading (BOLs) and automatically insert it into its database. The challenge is that each customer has a unique setup, so not all data is recorded the same way. Kognitos built automation workflows allowing Brown to manage BOLs and insert them into the database easily. This automation eliminates most of the manual data entry tasks associated with this business process.
We needed to extract data from a customer’s bill of lading. The challenge is that each customer is unique and how their data is recorded on the computer is unique. Kognitos automated the workflows so the BOL can be inserted into the database automatically.
Todd Hahn, VP of Process Improvement & Management at Brown.
Unlike other business automation platforms, RPA companies, Kognitos’s vision for a no-code or low-code environment set it apart. The ability to extract data without hiring a technical team was exactly what Brown needed to scale its operations.
Todd explains that building a structured RPA solution in the trucking industry can be challenging. Many trucking companies are intimidated to start and feel they will need to hire technical people, which they don’t have resources for. He’s happy to tell them about Kognitos because it blows these myths out of the water.
“One of the best parts about Kognitos is that anyone with mid-level technical abilities can use it. Kognitos has a user-friendly interface, and there’s no coding experience required.”
Todd Hahn, VP of Process Improvement & Management at Brown.
Todd explains that Brown plans to expand its use of Kognitos to other divisions, including accounting and safety.
In an increasingly digital world, automation is a necessity. In the logistics world, RPA can help you do more with less.
The critical advantage of RPA is that it allows logistics companies to automate tasks that would typically take up employees’ time — which frees them up for more critical work. This means that RPA helps logistics companies save money on labor costs while improving productivity at the same time.
According to the Deloitte Global RPA Survey, 53% of respondents have already started their RPA journey. This is expected to increase to 72% in the next two years. If this continues at its current level, RPA will have achieved near-universal adoption within the next five years.
Kognitos can automate many repetitive tasks vital to your business, such as quote generation, invoice processing, credit card payment reconciliation, bills of lading entry, or any other repetitive process.
Bill of lading audits
Order processing
