At Sedisp, every arrival comes with three documents: the invoice, the delivery note and the customs declaration. There are more than 400 arrivals a day.
Sedisp runs the warehouse that supplies Costa Cruises’ ships. Whatever comes in has to be checked line by line against what was ordered. That check is what says whether a delivery is right, and until recently the back office did it by hand.
The problem
Four hundred arrivals a day, one check at a time
Before quadra, the documents arrived as scans. Someone had to open them, read them, compare every line with the order and then key the data into the system. It was the work of four or five people in the back office.
Time was only part of the problem. Until the check was done, receiving stayed open: the goods were in the warehouse, but as far as the system knew they hadn’t arrived. Every back-office delay became a warehouse delay.
And at those volumes, a check done by hand is a check that lets things through. A difference between ordered and received that nobody notices is one nobody can fix.
“[Quote to collect: what receiving looked like before quadra, in Valentina’s words.]”
The solution
An evolution, not a new system
Sedisp didn’t want to change systems. Its management system runs on an AS/400, the flows with Costa Cruises are built around it, and the people in the warehouse know it. What it needed was an evolution of what was already there, not a migration project.
So quadra’s agents work where the work already went. They read the scanned documents, pull out the lines and match them to the right order. Then they write the result straight into the system, through the same file format it already used.
When the numbers add up, receiving closes. When they don’t, the agent doesn’t decide on its own: it flags the difference to the right person, with the document and the order line already in front of them.
“[Quote to collect: why an evolution of the existing system rather than a new one.]”
The results
Receiving closes in minutes
Today 97% of documents are handled automatically. Receiving, which used to wait on the back office, closes in minutes.
360 hours a month, three people
The time freed adds up to 360 hours a month of back-office work. The three people who spent it retyping documents weren’t replaced: they moved to operations, where their work counts for more.
More differences found, not fewer
The less obvious result is about the quality of the check. On supplies for Costa Cruises’ ships, 80% of ordered-versus-received checks are now automated, and in the first three months 12% more discrepancies were caught. A check that looks at every line finds what slipped through by hand.
Does your back office work the way Sedisp’s did before quadra?
The lesson from Sedisp isn’t that automation is fast. It’s that checks can get stricter at the very moment they stop weighing on people.
- Start with the document that holds everything up. At Sedisp it was receiving: until it closed, the warehouse waited.
- Don’t change systems. The agents work on the AS/400 that was already there, through the existing file formats.
- Move people, don’t remove them. The 360 hours freed each month went back into operations.
- Measure what you find. More discrepancies caught is the sign the check now works.
Sedisp started with a single process, receiving. Everything else builds on top of it.
