Bill of Lading Digitization

The Bill of Lading Digitization solution is an enterprise automation tool that uses Infor Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to address the challenges of manually processing signed Bill of Lading documents. It automates the collection of signed and scanned Bill of Lading documents from a shared folder in One Drive, extracts relevant document attributes, and uploads the scanned documents to Infor Document Management (IDM). By storing these documents in IDM, the solution provides streamlined navigation for customer inquiries, therefore enhances operational efficiency, reduces errors, and eliminates the need for manual intervention.

In a normal setup, a chief financial officer for example, may encounter this process:

  1. The customer signs the paper Bill of Lading document upon receipt.
  2. The signed document is scanned at a recommended resolution of 300 DPI and saved as a PDF in a shared folder.
  3. Store signed receipts are digitally processed using the M3 Bill of Lading Digitization 3.0 solution. To do this, start the RPA process called M3BillOfLadingDigitization_3_0 in the Infor RPA Assistant.
    1. The RPA process collects the PDF files from the shared folder and extracts information including the Bill of Lading numbers, Delivery numbers, and Transport IDs.
    2. The same files are uploaded to Infor Document Management (IDM) with Document Type set as Bill of Lading (M3_BOL), along with other relevant attribute values.
      Note: If a PDF file contains several Bill of Lading numbers, the file is split into as many Bill of Lading numbers to ensure each PDF contains only one Bill of Lading number.
    3. After the process is completed, assigned users or user groups receive an ION Notification in the M3 Inbox with the results, including success and failure counts.
The latest version of Bill of Lading Digitization introduces these key improvements:
  • New key attributes: The AI‑powered Infor Document Processor (IDP) flow now retrieves the Delivery number and the Transport ID from the document in addition to the Bill of Lading number.
  • Business context model support: You can now access the Bill of Lading document directly from IDM when you use the 'Delivery. Open Toolbox' (MWS410) function in M3. No additional steps needed.
  • OneDrive support: Incoming documents and processed results are now saved to a OneDrive folder instead of a local server or a local computer folder.

You can run this solution in unattended or attended mode. Attended mode requires manual initiation by a user, while unattended mode runs automatically on a schedule without user intervention. The process flow steps are mostly similar for both but this documentation focuses on the attended mode.

For information on deploying the unattended mode, contact your system administrator.