KCE Logistics Automates Accounts Payable with Reform

KCE Logistics, Inc. is a mid-size freight forwarder with a warehousing and distribution arm based in South Florida. Co-Owner and Director Young Eun Park describes the company as “never satisfied with the status quo,” adding, “we’re a highly service-based company that believes technology brings many benefits in terms of how it enables us to deliver a better customer service experience to our clients.”

The Problem: manual processes involve unnecessary team input

According to Young, the first pain point they turned to Reform for help with was their accounts payable (AP) process. It was totally manual and relied heavily on individual follow-ups across (often unnecessarily) involved teams. Invoices were handled via email-based exchanges with Operations, followed by manual data entry and posting.

“This process created significant back and forth, limited visibility, and caused frequent delays as critical steps depended on teams whose primary focus wasn’t financial admin.” says Young. The tipping point for KCE came when they recognized that addressing individual inefficiencies was no longer sufficient to keep up with their scaling goals. “We needed to rethink the process end-to-end,” Young relays. “Rather than chasing invoices through email, we needed to focus on connecting the full workflow: automated invoice intake, centralized document management, data validation, and batch posting.”

The Solution: intelligent automation from a team of experts

A key differentiator that helped KCE ultimately decide on partnering with Reform was the team behind the software. “Your people are always highly responsive, collaborative, and engaged.” Young says, continuing, “Communication has consistently felt like a partnership rather than a vendor-customer relationship and the company’s ongoing focus on improving customer experience adds long-term value for us as it mirrors our own customer-centric outlook.”

That user focus starts with Reform’s product interface. Document ingestion only needs a plain language description that outlines all the relevant data elements; regardless of the document length or format. This simplicity is what allows non-technical employees to define business logic without the need for coding skills.

By centralizing invoicing within the Accounts Payable department, the Operations team could get back to focusing on customer service and their other core specialities rather than being distracted by administrative tasks.

“The Reform team has remained highly engaged throughout implementation, providing timely support and guidance. The flexibility to create and adjust workflows internally—combined with the Reform partnership—has been a key factor in the success we’ve seen.”

- Young Eun Park, Co-Owner, KCE Logistics, Inc.

While KCE had full confidence in Reform’s technical credentials from the outset, something else that became evident early on in the relationship was the human-generated business logic and validation rules. All of that went a long way toward showing Young that Reform was the right choice for KCE.

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The Result: shifting from reactive to proactive means more resources where they’re needed

Pre-Reform, KCE was largely operating in reactive mode, Young tells us. “A significant amount of time was lost catching up on invoice posting, managing backlogs, and coordinating cross-team responses.” Post-implementation, things look very different. “The invoicing process is centralized and structured. Invoices are received, organized, and batch-processed through Reform. This has given us an invoicing setup that is ready to scale with KCE.”

KCE is now running a collection of automations (some general, some specific to individual vendors with more proprietary invoices) that all feed into their AP module in Magaya. Reform’s AI handles data ambiguity by extracting data regardless of formatting or file type. The plain language descriptions allow KCE to make adjustments internally thanks to one-on-one training provided by their dedicated Reform engineer.

When asked about the results of partnering with Reform, Young said, “Urgency has been reduced and the organization can redirect the time and attention previously wrapped up in this process and direct it toward higher-valued financial analysis rather than manual data entry tasks.” Where previously it was common for high-volume vendor invoices to post months after issuance, Reform has enabled the KCE team to fully close out these invoices on time.

Another aspect of Reform’s AI that has been invaluable to KCE’s quick adoption is the semantic field matching. The system sees two invoices from “Advanced Logistics Solutions” and “Advanced Transport, LLC,” and is able to correctly match them as the same company, while separating them from “Import Logistics Solutions.” This level of data ambiguity resolution has enabled KCE to consolidate automations with natural language filters, rather than requiring string-comparison algorithms.

By the numbers, KCE estimates that the average time to post vendor bills has gone from 15+ days to ~5 days. “That’s a meaningful improvement in operational efficiency. And this is after only automated a single workflow.” Says Young. KCE is so happy with their results, they’re expanding to using Reform for both Accounts Receivable (AR) and Electronic Export Information (EEI). 

In closing, Young summed things up: “Reform is an investment that, when set up thoughtfully at the outset, becomes a meaningful asset faster than you imagine. Reform removed a significant amount of manual work and enabled us to shift from transactional processing to analysis and control.”