What exactly is dottle?
dottle is a product of Bonsai Software from Rotterdam. It is built for one thing: reading incoming documents and delivering the data into the system where the work happens. Think of an order arriving as a PDF in your inbox, a CMR waybill scanned at the loading dock, or a packing list forwarded as a screenshot. Normally someone rekeys that data into the ERP or TMS. With dottle, the system does the reading. The employee checks and approves, but the keystrokes are gone.
Which documents does dottle handle?
dottle processes the documents that cost the most manual effort in operations: purchase orders and sales orders, invoices, CMR waybills, packing slips and packing lists, work orders and inspection reports. It does not matter whether they arrive as a PDF, scanned photo, Excel file or email attachment. dottle reads varying formats without requiring a template per sender. Receiving orders from twenty suppliers, each with their own layout? Not a problem. The system recognises the context of a document, not just the fixed position of a field.
What makes dottle different from standard OCR or scan-and-recognise?
Standard OCR recognises text. dottle understands what a document says. The difference: an OCR tool converts a CMR into a text file. dottle reads the CMR, extracts the order number, weight, delivery location and sender, matches those against the open order in your TMS and flags it when the quantities do not align. It then waits for approval from an employee. That is not scan-and-recognise, that is document processing with context. Discrepancies are not glossed over but flagged. The decision stays with the user.
What results do customers achieve?
Cabooter Group, a logistics and transport company, processes more than 70,000 documents per year through dottle. Of those documents, 85% pass through fully automatically, without anyone touching them. That delivers approximately 110,000 euros in savings per year. CMRs, invoices and orders that previously arrived by email were manually retyped. HDG, active in food and quality inspection, processes 200,000 packing lists per year. Manual work dropped by 90 percent, and an employee who previously did data entry now works on the floor doing inspection work. These are not promises; they are figures from customers running the system.
When is dottle not the right solution?
Automation only makes sense when there is volume and when the process is consistent. If you process ten documents a week from the same sender in the same format, the investment is probably not worth it. If the source data is structurally poor, if handwritten notes form the core of your document flow, or if the processing rules differ entirely from document to document, the logical first step is to get the process in order. dottle is not a fix for a chaotic document flow; it amplifies what is already there.
How quickly can you get started?
dottle is live in two weeks, with no setup fee. There is no implementation trajectory lasting months. The connection to your existing system, whether that is SAP, Exact, AFAS, Business Central, Transpas or another package, is set up as part of onboarding. Pricing is tiered per document, so you pay based on usage. Your documents are not used to train models. New document formats and processing rules are added in a controlled way, not learned automatically, which keeps the system predictable and auditable.