Shipping agent Cory Brothers manage their sea of paper.

Document Genetics has helped Shipping Agent Cory Brothers develop their own shipping agency management system - ShipTrak.

ShipTrak was designed to deal with "The huge amount of paper flowing around the world." Said Andy Triscott, IT Manager at Cory Brothers.

Business issues and needs: Cory Brothers manage ships on behalf of clients at Ports Worldwide and aims to react quickly to ensure fast and efficient turnaround of these ships. In order to achieve this, they needed a process to include a remote scan utility which would integrate with ShipTrak and allow Cory offices and agents to scan documents and supplier invoices which would instantly be available for viewing by clients anywhere in the world.

For example, if they supply 3 boxes of vegetables to a Malaysian tanker in Felixstowe, Cory wanted the owners of that ship, who might be based in Kuala Lumpa, to see a copy of the invoice from the vegetable supplier, from within ShipTrak in real time.

ShipTrak, an internet-based application was built around Cory's Oracle database and developed using infoRouter to provide the back end document management storage facilities.

Working closely with Document Genetics, Cory Brothers developed the remote scan utility to allow Cory offices to scan batches of documents in disparate locations and submit them over their WAN link to the central infoRouter Server at Cory's offices in Felixstowe for publication. The remote scan utility gets around the band width issue by packaging all of the images into one compressed file, then transmitting this automatically via secure FTP.

Before a document is scanned, a barcode label is attached to the document, which contains a unique document reference. This barcode is automatically read by the remote scan utility and once the document is loaded into infoRouter, an index is automatically created using this reference. This unique reference is then entered automatically against the document transaction on ShipTrak, which then ties up the image of the document within infoRouter to the transaction on ShipTrak. When a customer wants to view a specific document in ShipTrak for one of their vessels, they simply hit a button which drills directly to the document held within infoRouter, and then they can email, print or simply view it.

Benefits:

• Customer visibility and instant access to documents means queries can be dealt with straight away.
• Gives Cory a competitive advantage and adds value to any Cory business proposal.
• It is quick and easy to verify costs using Shiptrak so payment of invoices is quicker.

"The better we perform as an Agent, the more we have to offer our customers" says Andy Triscott.