Sneak Peek: Reform Workflows

Workflows are Reform’s newest product that takes us one step closer to realizing our mission of democratizing access to cutting-edge technology in the logistics industry. Workflows are a neat way for logistics service providers to automate back-office tasks end-to-end.

While building this product we had two main pillars in mind: flexibility and ease of use. We wanted workflows to be so easy to build that any non-technical operator can configure a workflow in less than 5 minutes. It was also critical for us for Workflows to be flexible enough to adapt to the nuances of a typical freight forwarder or customs broker's operations.

Let’s say you are a customs broker. Your clients send you documents that contain information you need to file for customs on their behalf. The problem is that your clients could send you multiple documents, each document contains 10s of pages and you’re only really interested in a couple of them.

Today, the way you deal with this is you hire a couple back-office workers to sift through the different documents, identify the pages that contain the necessary information, manually extract this information into a spreadsheet, and then manually enter this data into the customs filing portal.

This process is time-consuming and prone to errors because it involves multiple manual steps. Each step, from sifting through documents, identifying relevant pages, extracting information, and entering data into a portal, requires human intervention. This not only consumes significant time but also increases the risk of human error. Errors might occur in the identification of relevant pages, data extraction, or data entry, leading to inaccurate information being entered into the customs filing portal. Such inaccuracies can lead to costly mistakes and delays in customs clearance.

Reform lets you configure a workflow for this exact use case while taking into account all of those nuances. On Reform, your end-to-end workflow might look like so:

You can think of this workflow as an end-to-end automation that mirrors what a human might do. Here's what this workflow will do behind the scenes:

• Look at the document and break it into its subdocuments, which might be a Port of Arrival Notification, a Bill of Lading, and a Commercial Invoice
• It goes through every subdocument and classifies each of them into one of those document types
• Runs some conditions to identify the document we’re interested in
• It recognizes that the document we’re interested in is the Bill Of Lading
• It extracts the desired data from the identified BOL and notifies a human to come and double-check the extraction result to make sure there are no errors
• Automatically sends the extracted data to the customs filing portal
• Task done!

This entire workflow, that traditionally took at least 30 minutes to complete, now takes less than 5 minutes, leading to significant time savings, improved accuracy by reducing manual errors, and increased productivity for your business.

Wondering how workflows can help your business? Click here to book a personalized demo.