Escher selects Hurricane Commerce as data partner to create OCR engine

Postal and courier industry solutions supplier Escher has selected Hurricane Commerce as its data partner to create an optical character recognition (OCR) engine.

Last month, Escher bought Helsinki-based Syslore to bring a collection of proven, AI-powered parcel processing services to its postal and parcel customers around the world.

The new deal with Hurricane Commerce enables Escher to further reduce shipments’ processing and sorting time as well as costs through a powerful, machine-learning-based OCR engine with the aim to increase mail and parcel automation.

It also provides a platform to digitise the collection of customs, duties and taxes (CDT) and customer contact data to reduce the cost of cross-border compliance while mail and parcel sort-to-light solutions will increase the speed and reduce the cost of manual sorting.

Hurricane’s solutions include its Zephyr data enhancement tool and its Aura solution which covers the three critical cross-border areas of duty and tax calculation, prohibited and restricted goods screening and denied parties screening.

A raft of new regulations in 2021 including the EU’s abolition of the VAT exemption on low-value goods and the introduction of the Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) means that complete and accurate shipment data, including product descriptions and HS6 codes, is mandatory,

Brody Buhler, CEO of Escher Group, said: “The integration of Hurricane’s game-changing data solutions will significantly enhance the capability of our OCR engine. It is part of our commitment to providing our postal operator and courier customers with a total set of solutions.”

David Spottiswood, Co-Founder of Hurricane, said: “We are delighted that through our successful partnership with Escher Hurricane’s data solutions will form a key part of the new OCR service following the acquisition of Syslore.

“The regulatory landscape has changed enormously in the space of just a few months, impacting all parts of the cross-border e-commerce supply chain.”