Over 15 billion logistics documents are generated each year in India. Each of these documents has at least one copy made per shipment. A solution is needed that manages them electronically and facilitates transition of industry from a paper-dominated world to a digital first one seamlessly.
With the recent growth projected for the Indian logistics sector, there is one process, which has been ignored as a cost of being in this business — Document Deluge — the challenge of dealing with the volume of paper exchanged between stakeholders in logistics. More than 15 billion logistics documents are generated every year in India, with each of these documents has at least one copy made per shipment.
E-way bills and supporting documents alone accounted for six billion documents. Shipping bills and their supporting documents exceed another billion. We estimate a spend of €21 billion annually for the generation, processing, copying, archival and management of these logistics’ documents. Eighty per cent of these documents are exchanged on paper during shipment. Less than 1 per cent of these documents are digitised end-to-end.
These volumes also indicated much larger issues concerning paper-based processes, including lack of audit logs and massive stacks of unstructured data that would require resources to extract meaningful information.
Single sources of truth and standardised formats leading to issues in managing versions, validation of documents such as ID proofs becomes cumbersome for all entities involved in shipping and logistics, storage facilities contain these documents, frequently without archival methods, leading to issues with extraction (for auditing, validation or corrections) and could open businesses to the risk of fraud and data breaches.
The documents were rife with errors due to manual processing, which were harder to correct, considering the challenges in search and retrieval. Physical documents are subjected to weather overtime. Sometimes, extreme events lead to the eventual, irreversible loss of organisational data. All these challenges inevitably lead to higher cost of operations, inability to take data-driven decisions, inordinate delays in fulfillment and overall lack of governance and accountability.
Digitalisation of documents
To solve this Document Deluge, we need a comprehensive solution that would manage them electronically and facilitate the transition of the industry from a paper-dominated world to a digital-first one seamlessly.
Our Secured Document Exchange (SDEX) platform concluded a project at a large warehouse facility in Bengaluru, as Proof of Concept to measure the impact of the SDEX platform for large-scale manufacturers. The results highlight the need for a solution, such as SDEX in the logistics industry:
- For document storage and retrieval, the warehouse can save up to 50 per cent of their costs with SDEX
- The document retrieval turnaround is reduced from several days to a few seconds
- The client is now eliminating the production of 90,000 reams of paper, offsetting 770 kg of CO2 per year.
- SDEX improved the operational efficiency by 30 per cent in the first year of the POC
- Seamless management of role-based access and tiered access to documents
- With a single platform for document management, the customer can meet compliance, regulatory and audit needs across the board, including adherence to standards such as ISO9001 and SSL
