Press Release Navia Freight deploys Raft AI, streamlines operations, and delivers a new class of performance insights

Integrated logistics provider using AI technology platform to manage freight, 75% of invoices are now processed automatically, with minimal human intervention

London, UK, Tuesday 9th July 2024: Raft today announced that Navia, an integrated global freight and logistics company, has successfully rolled out its AI-automated logistics finance capability to process high volumes of AP invoices.

Every month, Navia finance teams receive thousands of invoices from the partners they work with to keep their customer’s freight moving. With Raft, AI now handles the bulk of that processing, including not just document processing and data extraction, but also validation against existing data. This allows Navia teams to focus on providing services and value to their customers.

Navia is a vertically integrated supply chain partner that provides solutions in purchase order and vendor management, freight forwarding, customs brokerage, and third-party logistics for B2B and e-commerce applications. Experienced staff with deep-level expertise leverage both proprietary and partner technology to move hundreds of thousands of containers a year across 9 offices globally, with over 100,000 items dispatched for some of the world’s leading retail and industrial machinery companies.

“AI now takes care of more than 3,000 minutes a week of document processing, which previously were tasks that our staff did not enjoy,” said Rob Ardesi, Chief Operations Officer at Navia. “The automation provided by Raft also required us to have our processes optimized, which helped identify areas for improvement which otherwise would have gone unnoticed.”

AI is helping Navia overcome the hurdles of manual financial operations with zero-touch invoice processing, automated approval workflows, and centralized dashboards. Today, 35% of invoices received don’t need any human intervention to process successfully, and another 40% require just one touch. At scale, these were workloads that previously consumed a significant amount work by the Navia finance teams.

Raft is the world’s largest AI-powered logistics platform, used by more than 50 logistics providers – companies that together help run 80% of the Global 1000 supply chains. Each year, more than 10,000 users manage over 5 million shipments on the platform, representing every commodity, transit mode, and trade lane.

“From day one, the Navia team saw the immense potential that AI can bring to the logistics industry,” said James Coombes, Chief Executive Officer of Raft. “As AI continues to mature, we will see a massive shift in how technology is used to move freight. We are thrilled to be on the journey with Navia team.”

Navia’s accounts payable team previously dealt with constant headaches and stress caused by human error as costs were being allocated incorrectly.  The Raft platform automated the entire process, making it more efficient, while simultaneously improving accuracy.

Greg Amanatidis, Director of Communications and Enablement at Navia added, “ultimately, Raft allows us to provide better services to our customers. Operations teams have more capacity and insights to keep freight moving and disruptions minimized.”