Overview

Midwest Wheel was founded in 1911 and is a fifth-generation family-owned business headquartered in Des Moines with nine locations and growing in Iowa and Missouri. Midwest Wheel is one of the largest truck parts distributors in the Midwest carrying a full line of replacement heavy-duty fleet products, light truck accessories, light trailer products, commercial fleet parts, and school bus replacement parts. 

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

Midwest Wheel handles more than 1,500 signed picklist tickets daily, encompassing both pick-up and delivery operations. Pick-up tickets were stored in a traditional filing cabinet, while the delivery tickets were maintained within the Samsara truck routing application. However, this dispersion of documents across different platforms introduces inefficiencies and contributes to customer friction when inquiries are made. Moreover, the sheer volume of paperwork generated from these operations imposes a considerable demand for physical storage. 

For example, when a customer makes an inquiry for pick-up documents, sales reps invest up to 20 minutes searching through the filing cabinets to locate the documents. Furthermore, if the inquiry is made at a busy time at the pick-up counter, the inquiry is redirected to administration, resulting in a significant delay before the customer receives a response. This inefficient process not only consumes valuable time for both customers and employees but also poses a genuine risk of damaging customer relationships. Prompt and accurate answers are essential for ensuring customer satisfaction, making it imperative to address these inefficiencies.

There is also a potential risk of uncollected payments or unwarranted refunds/replacement orders due to misplaced documents.  Continuing to rely on disconnected and paper-based document management, especially when key documents are difficult to locate, negatively impacts the business.

The Solution

We digitized pick-up ticket processing across nine locations using Infor OS technologies- Infor Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Infor Document Processing (IDP) and Infor Document Management (IDM).  Signed pick-up tickets are stacked, scanned, and uploaded to a file system.  RPA uses IDP to intelligently split documents by order number and extracts metadata for subsequent upload into IDM.  Automatic linking of documents with the corresponding order uses IDP’s AI-based OCR.   

Delivery tickets are also centralized in IDM by integrating Samsara’s Proof of Delivery (POD) documents using Infor ION. Using Python scripting, documents are converted to PDF with extracted metadata and uploaded into IDM. 

All picklist tickets are now digitized and centralized for access anytime, anywhere. Any CloudSuite Distribution user can easily find, email, print, etc picklist documents in a few clicks. 

The results

Through automation capabilities integrated with Infor OS, all POD documents are now centralized online in a document management system.  This streamlined process improved traceability and enhances customer service because documents are available on-demand across the organization for any inquiry. Benefits achieved through automation include: 

• Reduced paper and paper handling costs  
• Instant access to customers’ delivery and pick-up ticket information  
• Greater responsiveness and transparency after delivery and pick-up 
• Accurate record-keeping and improved customer service 
• Lost revenue and extra costs due to lost documents 

Metrics

• Better customer experience – up to 99% faster customer service resolution when picklist inquiries are made 
  • From 20 min when digging into the file cabinets to 1 min with quick access to documents online.   
  • From half a day when customer inquiries are redirected to 1 min  
• More efficient and happier employees – save 20 min per inquiry since documents are available online instead of digging through file cabinets.   
• Cost-effective digitization- 500 signed paper picklist ticket documents at pick up processed in 5 min without human intervention 
• Approximately 1,500 picklist ticket documents are centralized in IDM per day without human intervention 
• Fast to deploy – 2 days for Samsara integration and 10 days for pick up picklist ticket processing

The Technology

Infor Enterprise Automation is a new offering, which is a set of Infor OS services that work together to execute a business process.  Infor RPA takes care of the front-end automation that is labor centric and rules-based, while Infor ION or iPaaS takes care of backend automation through integration services using workflows to connect any combination of systems. Infor RPA, IDP, and ION are working together to execute for us the business process of centralizing picklist documents in IDM. 

Disruptive Factor

We became early adopters of Infor RPA to challenge existing norms.  Through this picklist processing use case, we learned that Infor’s enterprise automation capabilities are a real game changer to get organizations closer to digital transformation, which ultimately allows you to provide a better customer experience.  One of the challenges in transitioning to a digital environment is the allocation of resources required to manage and execute business processes that traditionally rely on paper documents. However, with the implementation of Infor RPA and IDP, we can now automate the sorting and filing of paper documents into an online document management system or IDM cost-effectively without the need for human intervention. 

Recognizing the value of IDM and the potential it holds, we further leveraged Infor enterprise automation with ION to centralize all our proof of delivery (POD) documents within IDM.  These automation capabilities allow us to centralize approximately 1,500 picklist documents per day without dedicating human resources to this task. This digital transformation has paved the way for us to provide an improved customer experience, as we can now retrieve and manage documents swiftly and seamlessly. 

Shining Moment

I’m proud of always testing new tools that ultimately make my work life better.  I tried ChatGPT to help me with scripting and in just one weekend and less than 100 lines of Python code, I implemented the ION workflow to process the Samara documents for upload into IDM.  Any Infor customer can take advantage of ChatGPT to enhance the Infor OS low code experience to create more optimal code, faster.  I’ve tested it and it works!