F500 automates delivery processing, driving cost and throughput gains

A global enterprise deployed autonomous AI agents to execute inbound delivery note processing end-to-end, eliminating manual touchpoints to drive faster fulfillment cycles, lower operational costs, and scalable throughput across its Global Business Services organization.

Autonomous delivery note execution

97% effort reduction

Audit-ready by default

Trusted by industry leaders

Our process

The Journey to Autonomous Enterprise Operations

At 1.1 million delivery notes per year, arriving in dozens of formats and multiple languages from suppliers across regions, the cost of manual processing had become a structural constraint impacting costs and topline. Each shipment note required extraction, validation, and reconciliation against procurement records. At approximately five minutes per case, the operation consumed over 91,000 staff hours annually, the equivalent of a large operations team dedicated entirely to delivery note handling.

Headcount could not scale proportionally without compressing margins. Multilingual complexity across regions meant that validation errors carried operational and compliance risk, compounding with every additional supplier and every additional language.

Previous approaches to handling this volume could not accommodate the variability of suppliers across languages and formats. Rule-based systems broke down at scale. The problem required a fundamentally different approach: autonomous execution that could interpret, validate, and reconcile without being manually configured for every document variant.

The enterprise recognized that this was not an optimization exercise. The operating model itself had to change. The question was whether autonomous execution could deliver the consistency and auditability that regulated, multi-region procurement operations demand.

A global enterprise operating across multiple countries with large-scale finance and procurement operations spanning regions.

Industry:

Global Business Services

Use Case:

Logistics delivery

Employees:

100,000+

HQ:

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The Challenge

Millions of Documents, Dozens of Languages, Zero Room for Error

Before Autonomous AI Agents were deployed, every delivery note followed the same path: manual extraction, manual validation against purchase orders, manual reconciliation, and manual posting. At 1.1 million documents per year, this created a processing operation that consumed the equivalent of over 50 full-time staff in effort alone.

Volume was only part of the problem. Cases arrived across 12+ languages and in varying unstructured formats. Every format and language variant required its own validation logic, and errors in any single step cascaded downstream through reconciliation and audit processes.

This complexity created compounding risk at scale. Manual cross-checking across languages introduced inconsistency. Reconciliation backlogs delayed procurement cycles. And the operation had no path to absorb volume growth without hiring proportionally, a model that could not sustain margin targets in a competitive environment.

The enterprise needed a new operating model: one where delivery note execution runs autonomously at production scale, with human oversight applied only to genuine exceptions, and with full auditability preserved across every region and language.

The Solution

Autonomous Execution With Governed Oversight

The enterprise deployed Otera to run delivery note execution autonomously from intake through reconciliation, with built-in validation, exception handling, and audit traceability at every step.

Autonomous agents across the document lifecycle. Specialized AI Agents handled each stage of delivery note processing: ingestion from supplier channels, data extraction across languages and formats, validation against purchase order records in the enterprise's procurement system, and quantity and pricing reconciliation. Rather than requiring manual configuration for each document variant, agents interpreted and adapted to new formats and languages autonomously, maintaining consistent accuracy across the full volume.

Human oversight on exceptions only. Of the 1.1 million delivery notes processed annually, 88% were executed autonomously with no human intervention. The remainder were routed to human reviewers with full context and pre-populated resolution recommendations. Average review time on these exceptions dropped to approximately 60 seconds per document, down from the five-minute baseline for fully manual processing.

‍Audit-ready by default. Every agent decision carried a complete audit trail: document source, extraction output, validation logic applied, matching outcome, and exception rationale where applicable. Compliance teams gained access to end-to-end traceability across all 1.1 million documents without requiring any manual documentation effort. Governed exception review ensured that the materials requiring human input followed standardized review protocols across all regions.

The Result

A New Operating Model for Enterprise Procurement

The results redefined the economics of delivery note execution across the enterprise:

97% effort reduction. Annual processing effort dropped from 91,600 staff hours to 5,500, freeing the equivalent of dozens of full-time roles for redeployment to higher-value procurement and supplier management operations.
8x return on investment from the initial delivery note scope within the first year of production.‍
Audit-ready consistency across every document, every language, and every region in scope, with full traceability and zero reliance on manual compliance documentation.