OCR Application Development for a Multinational Courier Company

Client

A multinational courier company

Industry

Logistics, Transportation

Services

Product Development

Technology

Swift, Kotlin, Google ML Kit

Challenge

A multinational courier company delivering billions of parcels a year faced a persistent challenge that hindered its operational efficiency. The company’s customers often submitted shipping forms riddled with errors, which was causing delays and negatively impacting customer satisfaction. The process of completing the forms was not only error-prone but also remarkably tedious. To address these issues and enhance the process of shipping form fulfillment, the company embarked on a mission to develop a new optical character recognition (OCR) application. The primary goal of the app was to reduce human error and make the process of filling out shipping forms more interactive and user-friendly. To bring the vision to life, the customer sought the AI development expertise of ITRex.

Specifically, our task was to:

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Develop iOS and Android mobile applications that would not only identify fields in the shipping forms by leveraging the power of AI algorithms but also provide interactive, real-time guidance on how to complete the forms.

Solution

The ITRex development team harnessed their expertise in crafting innovative AI-powered solutions. We designed and developed a pilot version of the OCR application. The solution is realized as a mobile application, built with the help of up-to-date OS-specific frameworks. The core functionality of both Android and iOS apps is centered around Google ML Kit that accurately identifies and processes the fields within the shipping form. Other essential components of the solution include:

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API for camera access: To enable the mobile app to recognize and interact with the shipping forms, we used a robust API for accessing camera hardware. This equipped the OCR application with the ability to capture and process images of the shipping forms.

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Optical character recognition: The application can accurately identify and highlight various fields within the shipping form, such as a sender’s address, recipient’s address, package dimensions, special instructions, and more.

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Real-time tips and guidance: The application engine provides interactive, real-time tips and guidance on how to fill out each form field, ensuring that the customers complete the form correctly. The guidance includes both short and long versions of text prompts.

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User-friendly interface: An intuitive and user-friendly interface guides customers through the process with ease.

Impact

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By providing real-time guidance and validation, the OCR application helped reduce errors in shipping forms and ensured that the customers submitted accurate and complete information.

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Customers welcomed the app’s interactive features, which made the form completion process more user-friendly. With the interactive guidance, even those unfamiliar with the shipping forms could complete them with ease and confidence.

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The company experienced a boost in operational efficiency due to a streamlined, error-free shipping process that resulted in faster and more cost-effective parcel processing.

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With the reduction in errors, fewer resources are needed to rectify issues, resulting in substantial cost savings.