Customer case studies

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation, Fort Worth, Texas

WayBill Processing System

A little about BNSF:

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (BNSF), headquartered in Fort Worth,

Texas, operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with 33,000
route miles covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces. BNSF has a long list of
clients who use BNSF’s railroad network as a primary means of transporting goods in
North America.

The Problem:
BNSF wishes to eliminate the manual data entry process in waybill processing. The
best solution would be to force all their existing clients to stop faxing BOLs (Bills of
Lading) to BNSF and instead start using the standard EDI404 interface to send BOLs
to BNSF. However, BNSF understands that it’s clients will not be willing to transition
overnight and expects this to happen over the next decade or so. In the interim period,
BNSF plans to use cutting edge OCR/ICR technology solutions from CMC for
automating this process such that BNSF receives a valid EDI404 document as a
deliverable that can be then used by their existing system to complete their Revenue
billing in a timely fashion.

Challenges faced by BNSF in the legacy system

In this manual data entry process for EDI 404 generation, BNSF has to depend on the
accuracy of the data entered by their clerical staff from the faxed BOLs.
Higher operating costs for using a large clerical staff for data entry activities. This staff
could be redeployed elsewhere in the organization for better productivity.
CMC’s Approach and Solution

CMC’s proposed OCR/ICR solution for automating BNSF’s waybill generation process
comprises of a fully integrated production system setup at its offshore facilities in India
and based on the Freedom suite of products OCR/ICR products from Top Image
Systems of Israel. A successful pilot project was executed for 9 clients of BNSF
having approx. 30 different formats of BOLs. Electronic copies of the faxed BOLs from
these clients were transmitted to CMC in India for processing using OCR/ICR
technology and then converting them to valid EDI 404 transactions and transmitting
these back to BNSF. The solution designed and developed was successful in
achieving an overall recognition rate of 84% in handwritten faxed BOLs and more than
96% in machine printed faxed BOLs.

The solution also contains validations and cross validation between the fields in a form
to minimize the errors in the data. The valid ASCII based data is then exported as the
final data and converted into EDI404 format by a conversion utility designed by CMC
EDI 404 document is then sent to the BNSF’s EDI Server in Fort Worth, TX over the
same 512 Kbps secure, dedicated leased link

During this EDI404 transaction generation process, the Bills of lading are also
validated using Patterns stored in the Database for automatically detecting and
correcting any illegible data from the faxed BOL.

Before sending the Mapped EDI404 strings to BNSF’s server, CMC runs a pattern
comparison to ensure the correctness of the EDI404 transaction. Once BNSF receives
the EDI404 transaction from CMC, BNSF does a check for accuracy of the transaction
based on which the transaction is processed and a waybill is generated against the
same.

Benefits of the Solution

An immediate benefit to BNSF by deploying the OCR/ICR Solution from CMC is the
reduction in its operating expenses by savings accrued on the clerical data entry staff
that can now be redeployed elsewhere within the organization thereby ensuring better
productivity as compared to mundane data entry work.