Under the Hood: Delivery Order Automation

Our engineering team rolled out another massive project this month, bringing automation and machine learning to the critical first step of the container delivery process – Delivery Order (DO) submission and dissemination. 

 

What is DO Automation?

With the DO Automation release, the engineering team introduced three major improvements to NEXT’s proprietary TMS system, ATLAS;

  • Through intelligent automation, information from a DO is now automatically extracted and generated in ATLAS. Whereas before NEXT Operators would have to manually upload and input DO information into ATLAS, we are now able to ingest a DO from various sources including EDI, and automatically gather the necessary data to create a shipment within seconds. 

 

  • Utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, our systems are now able to recognize containers that were submitted at different times from various sources, and combine them under the same Master Bill of Lading (MBOL) in ATLAS. This service provides more organization around shipments, giving Operators the ability to see exactly what needs to go into ATLAS in a single view.

 

  • We are now keeping our data in a relational database, which has led to much-improved performance, data reliability, decreased costs, better bandwidth, and more possibilities for improving our Delivery Order and Scraping services at NEXT.

 

What does this mean for NEXT?

Overall, these improvements resolve delays in finalizing shipments due to the manual work previously required from Operators throughout the DO submission and dissemination process. The automation of this process has led to a significant increase in productivity for NEXT Operators, empowering them to focus more on their core functions and less on time-consuming data entry. With DO Automation, NEXT is able to service more shipments, faster.

2021-06-23T17:13:26-07:00June 22nd, 2021|