CIFFA Forwarder Magazine

15 THE FORWARDER | WINTER 2025 Continuing its work to offer members an education in AI solutions, CIFFA’s Technology Committee enlisted associate member Mely.ai Solutions Inc. to provide an overview of intelligent document processing (IDP). Using automation and artificial intelligence to extract data from all kinds of documents, an IDP platform can make decisions and take appropriate actions to complete prescribed tasks. Where optical character recognition (OCR) – an older technology that converts scanned images of text into machine-readable, editable text – has restrictions based on document format, IDP can successfully extract data from handwritten notes, PDFs, email messages, images, EDI files and Excel sheets. Unlike OCR, IDP can also make sense of skewed and poor-quality scans and foreign- language documents. Nicolas Ferron and Olha Mullyar walked conference attendees through the workings of an IDP platform, providing a step-by-step look at how it operates. They demonstrated how to use the dashboard where AI rules for templates are accessed and how to enter new conditions to ensure the AI correctly captures and maps data from the variety of documents a user might have to process. Onboarding to an IDP platform appears to be fairly simple, and its use boosts team efficiency and accuracy. Only data that does not align with a department’s specified rules will be flagged to employees for attention. The rest is automatically put to use as needed in email messages, approvals, invoices and so on. The streamlining such technology enables helps businesses optimize their operations. Presenters, Introduced by Gary Nicholson, General Manager, Polaris: • Nicolas Ferron – Business Development and Customer Success, Mely.ai • Olha Mullyar – Account Executive, Mely.ai Transforming freight operations with intelligent document processing Sharing data today creates faster turn times tomorrow. The Port of Vancouver has some of the best truck turn times in North America. Thanks to the Port’s Truck Licensing System, GPS data is tracked allowing for efficient transport and reduced wait times. This is one delivery of the Port of Vancouver’s Connect+ program. portvancouver.com