Advantage Marketing, marketing platform, scales its business 5x times using Nanonets

THE CUSTOMER

Advantage Marketing Group is a group of incentivized marketing experts, providing solutions for retailer specific marketing platforms to increase sales, increase loyalty amongst shoppers and improve customer retention rates.

Advantage Marketing Group is based in Mexico and has operations across Latin America and Spain. As they continue to expand the business, onboarding more partners, brands and agencies, keeping a track of receipts coming in from multiple sources and digitizing them to strategize incentives was becoming cumbersome.

THE PROBLEM

Advantage Marketing, having partnerships with CitiBank Mexico, Corona Extra, Kellogg’s, Nestle and Walmart, was processing 20,000 receipts / brand / month. Hiring engineers to automate data capture was expensive, not scalable, especially at the scale that Advantage Marketing was growing.

The existing data-entry and review process was fraught with challenges leading to increased cost and time consumption and drop in accuracies:

• Some of the receipts had originally been faxed in and had different orientation
• Some were low resolution images that existing data extraction technology were unable to read and process
• The client hired 60 data keyers to manually index 100,000 receipts a month, extract the necessary information and get it into the correct system of record

Advantage Marketing was looking for a solution that could automate their entire workflow and seamlessly communicate with their marketing platform.

“We needed to scan the receipts, punch in all details, create separate folders by brands, and manage an excel spreadsheet for all the receipts we had received. We would spend 2-3 days in getting the documents prepared and the rest of the week digitising them and getting the data organised.”

Why NanoNets

“The system is easy to use and the moulding process is pretty intuitive.”

Advantage Marketing first tried out the Nanonets platform themselves to build a model. Having experienced the ease of building a highly accurate model for diverse data gave confidence to Advantage Marketing to reach out to Nanonets support to build a full-fledged model for them.

Within 7 days, Nanonets delivered an OCR model enabled to process Spanish receipts to capture numerous fields - Address, Total, Date, Ticket Number, Retailer, Product Name, Description, and Line Item Total. Nanonets’ unique expertise in data science, machine learning, deep learning, research, engineering and architecture enabled us to tackle them in the following ways:

• Lack of good quality useful data was a huge challenge. The images were often orientated differently or were blurred, making data capture extremely difficult. To tackle this, we deployed an on-premise smart data processing pipeline to capture only relevant info.
• Development of a solid technical architecture involved extensive study of data flow in the system and its different parts such as data processors, docker api etc.
• In order to convert the raw data into a format that is easily digestible by machine learning modules, we needed to annotate a huge amount of data. To ensure data privacy, we leveraged our in-house annotation team.
• We also wrote code for all other parts of the system so the solution is modular and can be deployed at scale.

Advantage Marketing easily integrated the API with their own marketing platform to demonstrate to a larger client base.

Results and What Next?

“The system works but the special ingredient is the customer service team, they are always available and helped a lot during the setup process.”

“Our management now feel more productive and happy as most of the clerical work is now out of their lives and we can focus on scaling growth more easily”

Nanonets strong belief in keeping the employees happy leads to a stronger organisation shall only further strengthen and deliver better products to their customers, and obligations towards their vendors.