Background

Bluegrass Supply Chain is a Bowling Green, KY-based third-party logistics company offering a full range of warehousing and transportation management services, including just under 100 trucks in their dedicated fleet. Bluegrass attributes its success over the years to being an early adopter of industry-leading technology to automate their in-house processes.

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Challenges

Bluegrass shared with Boon its administrative challenges in collecting and submitting its Bill of Lading (BOL) and Proof of Delivery (POD) documents in an efficient manner for its customers. The challenges as we saw them were thus:

1. Manual Document Upload: Bluegrass was forced to manually chase down BOL / POD documents, and upload them to an existing technology provider for forwarding to their customers. This involved chasing down drivers subsequent to a delivery, and having them scan or submit paper copies of the BOL/POD documents to a dedicated team member.
2. Compensation Gated by Documents: Bluegrass faced escalating pressure from its customers to submit the POD documents in a timely manner (within 3 days), or customers would contest the fees for transport.
3. Personnel Mismatch: A single team member at Bluegrass was assigned this responsibility, which meant there was little redundancy in the event this individual was unavailable. To make matters worse, this individual worked in the finance and accounting department, so this operational task was non-core and low-value relative to his responsibilities.

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Solution

Boon immediately saw an opportunity to help to add value by implementing our Automated Documents product. Boon’s Automated Documents allows Bluegrass drivers to take a picture of the BOL / POD documents and send them via text message or email directly to a dedicated Bluegrass inbox. Messages with attachments arriving in this inbox are then uploaded directly to Bluegrass’ technology provider.

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Results

Previously, Bluegrass estimated that the individual responsible for this process collects documents for about 150 loads per week and spends about 6 mins per load. Now Boon's solution conveys the following benefits to the Bluegrass team:

• Significant Time Savings: Bluegrass estimates that they were spending 6 minutes per load collecting documents, and were processing about 150 loads per week. Having documents auto-forwarded to an inbox for retention saves them 15 hours per week.
• Proper Resource Allocation: The team member responsible for this manual process has emails routed directly to a dedicated inbox, and can now spend most of his time focusing on his core responsibilities in accounting and finance.
• No More Contested Revenue: By collecting the Proof of Delivery documents within 30 minutes of arrival, Bluegrass can quickly pass documents on to their customers without facing disputes for the charges.

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Testimonial

"The Automated Documents product has been a game-changer for us because our customers will contest payment for our services if we don’t get the Proof of Delivery documents sent to them within three days of delivery. And it has been great to allow our team member responsible for this process to focus on his core responsibilities instead of this repetitive task.”

— Nissy Trombly, IT Manager, Bluegrass

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Conclusion

By incorporating Boon’s Automated Documents, Bluegrass drastically improved their document collection process, reduced their revenue risk, and saved 15 hours per week for its employees. To learn how Boon can help streamline your document collection and retention process, give us a call at (408) 320-6950.

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