Citrosuco

Citrosuco North America, established in 1963, is one of the world's largest processors of oranges and producers of frozen orange juice.

On a daily basis, Citrosuco's loading dock receives hundreds of truckloads of citrus which need to be received, inspected, and processed in a timely manner. In addition to their own business documentation, Citrosuco must comply with government regulations, and the company also acts as a broker for a number of other food product companies. For these reasons, they must retain and forward the appropriate documentation to these agencies.

Prior to having an electronic solution, this meant every truckload was assigned a load number which was handwritten on the back of a fruit ticket when the truck arrived at the Citrosuco loading dock. Later in the day, this fruit ticket was delivered by courier to the front office where someone would then match it to the corresponding USDA Inspection certificate. Finally, all the appropriate copies were made for all parties involved. While seemingly being a very simple process, this involved several hours of manual paper matching, copying, stapling, sorting, separating, and forwarding of documents.

Citrosuco's IT Director, Bill Bolden, looked to DocuVantage™ for help. DocuVantage™ implemented a system with two single-field screens to start the process, one each for the load number to be entered from the fruit tickets and the USDA Inspection Certificates. The load number from the fruit tickets is keyed into the system because they are handwritten; yet Bolden realized the potential for using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to read the Inspection Certificates as they are all printed on forms. Processing these Inspection Certificates became a matter of simply loading the scanner with a stack and monitoring the paper feed.

Approximately 70% of the scanned and OCR'd certificates are correctly identified without any human input. Only one operator working part-time is needed to verify any questionable characters. Within a mere two days, over 1,000 fruit tickets and Inspection Certificates are processed, matched, and an automated report is run daily to find any missing certificates - formerly a time-intensive search.

In addition to the time saved, Bechtel realized another advantage to their new EDM system. It eliminated the effort and expense of bringing yet another tractor-trailer to the property for storage of these documents. They already had two trailers on-site for this purpose, and this avoided having to bring in a third. Eventually these trailers will be removed as well.

Citrosuco now plans to integrate their existing database driven program with this new system for a simplified and foolproof solution that will allow the fruit tickets to be scanned and indexed at the kiosk on the loading dock.