PITT OHIO Automation Case Study

PITT OHIO elevated its customer service through Kofax Kapow™ which supported the company’s high-value customers by automating 100% of routine customer service activities. The company has reclaimed at least 90% of a CSR’s time for higher-value work, eliminated 100% of the cost for routine B2B portal updates and stopped costly transcription errors.

The Challenge

PITT OHIO, a premier transportation provider, is committed to providing incomparable service to its customers. With a dual emphasis on continuous improvement and technological innovation, the company has established a long-term strategy to reduce manual effort while enhancing customer service. The company has won several industry awards for the process.

Many organizations have turned to B2B portals—websites that partners and suppliers must use to submit and track business transactions—as a way to lower costs. But like other organizations, PITT OHIO found that manually accessing the B2B portals of their trading partners—over 70 in all, each with different logins, navigation, transactions and reports—had become prohibitively expensive.

Even more costly was the need to carry out repetitive business processes that involved their partners—processes that required PITT OHIO to enter duplicate transactions on multiple systems merely to keep them synchronized. For example, PITT OHIO offers a premium level of service to a select group of shippers. Among the services these customers receive is the ability to request pick-ups by email, but to support this benefit, PITT OHIO’s CSRs (Customer Service Representatives) had to manually re-key shipment details from the original email into their internal scheduling application. Then, to confirm the pick-up date and time, a CSR had to login to the shipper’s portal and re-key the response. Similar effort was needed for each of the many status updates that premium customers received for each shipment.

Because PITT OHIO’s premium customers enjoy a two-hour SLA, their CSRs developed their own paper-based system to track requests—and had to stop all other work once per hour to review their files, print incoming emails, and update each B2B portal with up-to-date status. This manual processing was so costly that each CSR could barely service a single premium customer. PITT OHIO could not afford to expand the program.

The Solution

PITT OHIO chose Kapow to automate multiple manual processes, starting with the pick-up request. Kapow reads each incoming email to extract shipment details—then logs in to the PITT OHIO scheduling system, navigates through its menus and enters shipment details into the scheduling system. When the scheduling system responds with a pick-up time, Kapow captures the time from the web page, logs in to the shipper’s B2B portal and posts the time into the shipper’s portal—all automatically, within seconds of the initial email, not hours after the fact. Because shipper-owned portals do not provide APIs, Kapow’s unique ability to control the application’s UI is critical to automating this process.

Kapow also provides automated updates whenever shipment status changes. For example, Kapow posts vehicle location into each shipper’s portal by capturing database updates made by PITT OHIO’s GPS tracking application, logging into the shipper’s portal and updating the portal. 100% of this activity is automated—none of a CSR’s time is needed to handle routine events.

The Results

By eliminating manual website updates, PITT OHIO has reclaimed 90% to 95% of a CSR’s time for higher-value work. Kapow’s automation has eliminated 100% of the cost of routine B2B portal updates and costly transcription errors have been eliminated.

PITT OHIO’s success automating its premium service offering has validated the plan to review, automate and streamline web-based business processes across the company. To date, this included the Credit and Collections group, which has succeeded in reducing Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by more closely managing receivables.

Thanks to remarkable productivity gains, PITT OHIO can now expand the scope of their premium service, increasing revenue at minimal cost.

Other uses for Kapow are still being studied, such as in applications creating complex Customs forms that are required during trans-border shipments, to simplify credit-card processing and even supporting PITT OHIO’s mobile apps.

About PITT OHIO

The transportation company provides less-than-truckload, truckload, supply chain solutions and ground services in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest areas of the United States. Founded in 1978, PITT OHIO is headquartered in Pittsburg, Pa. In 2014, the company ranked first for large companies on the annual list of the Top Workplaces in Pittsburg.

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