Between their diverse product catalogs and long lists of customers, distributors generate a whole lot of transaction data every day. But so much of that data is unstructured and visual, which usually slows the transaction.
To complete a transaction that begins with a paper order form, for example, someone has to scan the form, create a PDF, read the PDF, parse out all the relevant information and manually move that information into another system. It’s tedious, but more than that, it’s inefficient — which hurts the bottom line.
Sometimes when distributors determine the profitability of an order, they forget to factor in the cost of processing the order itself. If you’re paying someone $20 an hour and it takes them 15 minutes to manually enter information from the order form into another system, you’ve essentially just spent $5 on copying and pasting.
At ProfitOptics, we saw this as not only an opportunity to automate an inefficient process, but to improve the framework for order management. By skipping the tedious part, your team can spend more of their time leveraging their knowledge of customers to deliver the best experience possible. That’s why we designed ADAPT.
ADAPT is a platform that takes orders, invoices, purchase orders, returns, and other customer documents and transforms them from visual, unstructured data into digital, structured data. The digitized version of the form (along with the original document) is then automatically passed to an assigned team member to validate and move it through the workflow.
We called it ADAPT for a couple reasons. One, it allows you to adapt to your customers’ needs and preferences. Different customers will want to place orders in different ways, and with ADAPT, you can easily pull all your customer data into the same place, without pushing the customers out of their comfort zones.
Two, the ADAPT tool is skilled at adaptation. While it doesn’t need any training or programming to recognize invoices and purchase orders out of the box, it’s always adapting to your company’s preferences. When a human makes a correction to a document, ADAPT uses that information to improve its recognition abilities. As a result, ADAPT will make your order processing workflows even more efficient over time.
As with CARE, we designed ADAPT so that you can leverage it in whatever way makes the most sense for your organization. Its lean, purpose-built technology aims to provide the greatest possible benefit without requiring clients to pull their current solutions out by the roots and re-platform. It can be customized to fit wherever you need it to fit.
That means that if you just want to integrate ADAPT with your current ecommerce tool, we can do that for you. Your team won’t have to train on a new tool; instead, they’ll have a new function within the tool they’re already familiar with.
If you need ADAPT to serve as a foundation for order management, we can do that, too. ADAPT can become your organization’s interface for the process and then be built upon to meet your specific needs as they arise.
In other words, we’re not in the business of selling you a piece of prefab software and moving on. We also provide the ongoing service of sculpting ADAPT into a solution for your challenges. We can make it do as much or as little as you need it to do.
For example, we worked with a company in the building supply industry that had already invested in a similar tool that was working for around 80% of their orders. Instead of telling them to scrap that tool altogether, we said, “Let it run, and we can use our tool to handle the outliers.” Their version of ADAPT catches the trickier order forms and invoices and efficiently moves them through the workflow.
The tech at ADAPT’s core is called OCR, which stands for optical character recognition. If you tried an OCR tool in the past and were underwhelmed, that’s fair — the technology maybe wasn’t quite there yet. But it has made great leaps in recent years, and many AI models are excellent readers. For ADAPT, we’re leveraging a combination of the Google Vision API, GPT-4’s multimodal capabilities, and Amazon Rekognition to elevate your team’s productivity and make their lives easier.
Let’s say you’re a building supplies distributor, and you’ve got a regular customer who just ordered 50 squares of roofing, but they didn’t specify the type or color — the equivalent of nodding at your regular bartender and saying, “The usual.” ADAPT will do the job of cleanly translating that form and passing it along to the human rep who knows that “the usual” in this case is a specific type of roofing. That rep can input that tribal knowledge into the system, thus personalizing the tool and making future transactions that much smoother.
If your order management process seems to be missing a piece, we’re ready to make ADAPT fit. Reach out today to learn how it could crunch hundreds of hours of work into a far more profitable fraction of time.
