Example – a bill of lading document

Let’s take an example of a Bill of Lading document, which is one of the most important transport documents in international trade. It describes the contents of the shipment, its value, and the origin of the goods. It is still mostly written in paper form and is used for customs clearance, as well as for both the shipper and receiver to validate the contents of the shipment.

In many instances, where it is important to make sure the goods can be managed by an inventory system, there will be a team of human operators whose job is to adjust the inventory of a warehouse by taking information from the bill of lading document from a received package and enter it manually into an inventory system such as SAP:

Figure 10.1 – Bill of lading processing

Initially, the operators will be responsible for processing 100% of the information manually. We can automate this process somewhat by employing a combination of...