Boonstra Transport, a family business with a long history in the transportation industry, has been using ImageCapture to digitize their bills of lading since 2006. In 2011, the automated processing of purchase invoices was added. Thanks to the integration with their TMS Transpas and financial systems Exact Globe & Synergy, Boonstra now efficiently processes 80,000 transport orders and 8,000 invoices annually.
Boonstra Transport accelerates growth with smart automation of document management
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Founded in the 1920s, Boonstra Transport has grown into one of the largest transport companies in the Northern Netherlands. The family business offers fine-meshed distribution within the Benelux and Western Europe, with a modern fleet of 110 tractor units and a wide range of specialized services, from ornamental plants to secure transport. The company is strongly committed to innovation and sustainability, both in their transport equipment and business processes.
Ron Langeveld, Controller at Boonstra Transport, shares how deploying ImageCapture has led to more efficient processing of bills of lading and purchase invoices, which has helped the company do more work with the same number of employees.
Transport orders per year
Invoices per year
Orders per week
The challenge
Ron Langeveld: “The growth of Boonstra created great pressure on our administrative processes. Every week we received more than a thousand orders, each with accompanying freight documents such as CMRs, packing slips and transport orders. Manually processing all these documents was time-consuming and required a lot of storage space in the archive. In addition, it delayed our invoicing, which caused longer lead times.”
To cope with increasing workloads and improve efficiency, Boonstra decided to digitize their processes. This made it possible to process documents quickly and accurately without the need for extensive archives and manual searches.
Automation allows us to do more work with the same number of employees and has greatly improved our administrative process.
The process/method
Boonstra implemented ImageCapture to digitize both bills of lading and purchase invoices. Transpas, ArtSystems’ Transport Management System (TMS), is used here to process transport orders and freight documents, while Exact Globe & Synergy support the financial administration.
Waybills are automatically linked to the correct orders in Transpas. When a driver turns in his documents after a trip, they are scanned using barcodes and recognized immediately in ImageCapture. This automatically links the freight documents to the correct files, saving a lot of time. In addition, all documents are available digitally for the invoicing process, allowing invoices to be processed faster.
Boonstra receives both cost invoices and purchase invoices from external carriers. With ImageCapture, the invoices are linked to the correct files in Transpas and then exported to Exact Globe for further processing. The system automatically checks that the invoice matches the predefined prices in Transpas, preventing accounting errors.
Cost invoices are also automatically processed in ImageCapture, linking the correct accounts payable and general ledger accounts based on the data in Transpas. The approval workflow in Exact Synergy ensures that invoices are quickly approved and processed.
The result
Faster processing of transport documents
Automation of waybill processing has resulted in significant time savings. Whereas it used to take hours to manually look up documents and link them to files, this is now done within minutes.
Improved control and transparency
The integration with Exact Synergy has made the invoice approval process faster and more manageable. Employees no longer have to physically carry invoices around for signatures, resulting in more efficient accounts payable and better traceability of invoices.
More efficient administration
Thanks to ImageCapture, the administration department is able to do more work with fewer people. Digitizing bills of lading and invoices has not only saved time, but also reduced the risk of errors. In addition, the financial processing of invoices is now more manageable and faster.
Ron Langeveld
Boonstra Transport, Controller
What's next?
Boonstra Transport continues to focus on further automating our processes. “By continuing to invest in technology, we can further increase our administrative efficiency,” Langeveld said. The next step is to further optimize the cooperation between the transport and financial systems to further reduce lead times and further improve service to customers.
Solutions used
Consignment note processing
Transportation companies process various types of bills of lading on a daily basis. This leads to many operations such as checking, copying, sorting and archiving which takes a lot of time. These actions also slow down the invoicing process because of manual checking.
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Invoice processing
Booking, checking, filing and approving purchase invoices is a process that requires a lot of time and attention. Not only is manually processing invoices time-consuming, it is also very error-prone.
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