Established in 1964, Corlison Pte Ltd is one of the largest fully Singaporean owned distributors of personal, healthcare and home cleaning products in the country. The company also owns Pearlie White, the only home-grown oral care brand in Singapore, and manufactures its products locally for consumers all over the world.

A long-standing company with more than 50 years of heritage, employees were used to traditional, manual processes in their daily operations. Information of all transactions, including data for processing documents such as purchase orders and invoices of repeated orders were individually keyed in, generating high volumes of work that required excessive amounts of time to complete. The workflows were also liable to errors.

With consumer behaviour shifting towards e-commerce and a growth in sales, Corlison / Pearlie White found that the traditional operating model was no longer adequate to meet the changing needs of the business.

Tedious and Inefficient Manual Workflows

Both a manufacturer and distributor, Corlison / Pearlie White handles large volumes of documents daily, in different types and formats, from purchase orders to sales invoices. Processing these documents was tedious as employees had to manually key in by the piece. Manual data entry was also susceptible to human errors, and resources had to be set aside to ensure accuracy of work, creating labour-intensive and error- prone workflows.

Productivity Loss from Time-consuming Tasks

Processing documents became progressively wearisome due to the time- consuming data entry tasks. Every entry needed a considerable amount of time to complete, as limited resources had to be channelled into verifying and validating, even for small and simple transactions. It built up into an unproductive system that began to affect employee morale.

Dip in Employee Morale

Corlison / Pearlie White began to receive feedback from employees that the current work was mundane, and desired more challenging tasks. Employee morale decreased from the monotonous repetitive tasks. Understanding that there was a need for change, this became a turning point for the company.

Accelerating the Digital Shift into A Future-Ready Workplace

To tackle the unproductive manual processes, Corlison / Pearlie White needed a digital transformation. IRISXtract™, an innovative AI-based information management solution, was recommended by the Canon team as a holistic fix targeting the core issue: tedious and error-prone manual data entry.

Implemented and configured to fit Corlison / Pearlie White’s business needs, IRISXtract™ seamlessly integrated with their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The flexible and template-free solution also automated their data extraction process. The solution’s AI-based classification helped to simplify the process by identifying features and values unique to different types of purchase orders, extracting indexes automatically and vetting the data for accuracy through an extensive set of rules. Corlison / Pearlie White can now process transactions from different platforms in various formats effortlessly.

With online transactions increasing by 30%, the scalability of the solution enabled Corlison / Pearlie White to cope with the exponential growth in demand. Employees quickly adapted to IRISXtract™ as they saw instantaneous results with process automation. They were able to cope with higher volume orders at lower production costs with the same headcount, which allowed the company to achieve a good Return On Investment (ROI) within the year of implementation.

Corlison / Pearlie White found that by automating the purchase order process, workload was significantly reduced leading to a 10-fold increase in productivity. Employees can now process 10 times the number of purchase orders, within the same amount of time. With the elimination of manual data entry, errors reduced by 90% and there was no loss of documents during processing. Employee morale improved as the focus switched to quality control and opened avenues for resources to be channelled into data-analysis, improving business operations and customer service.