From Inbox to ERP: Automating Shipping Instructions in Logistics
TL;DR: Logistics companies receive shipping instructions via email in countless formats: booking requests, airway bills, CMR documents, bills of lading. Documind extracts structured data from these documents, making it ready for your automation layer (RPA, custom code, or workflow tools) to push into your ERP or TMS. The result: faster processing, fewer errors, and operations teams focused on exceptions rather than data entry.
Why Shipping Instructions Are So Hard to Process
Whether you operate in ocean freight, air cargo, or road transport, the challenge is the same: shipping instructions arrive in inconsistent formats from multiple sources.
Operations teams face a constant stream of documents:
- Ocean: Bills of lading requests, booking confirmations, dangerous goods declarations
- Air: Airway bill instructions, shipper’s letter of instructions, security declarations
- Road: CMR consignment notes, delivery orders, transport instructions
Each customer sends documents in their own format. Some use structured PDFs, others send scanned images or even photos. Email attachments vary: sometimes a single instruction, sometimes bundled with packing lists, certificates, or DG forms.
Add country-specific requirements (mandatory tax IDs for certain destinations, specific address formats, compliance fields that vary by trade lane), and manual processing becomes a bottleneck that doesn’t scale.
Where Documind Fits In
Documind handles the document intelligence layer: classifying documents and extracting structured data. What happens next (pushing data to your ERP, triggering workflows, handling exceptions) is up to your automation layer, whether that’s RPA, custom integrations, or workflow orchestration tools.
Document Classification
When documents arrive, Documind identifies what you’re dealing with:
- Is this the main shipping instruction or a supporting document?
- Is there a dangerous goods declaration attached?
- Are there invalid attachment combinations that need to be flagged?
This classification feeds into your automation logic, which can route documents accordingly or send rejections back to senders.
Structured Data Extraction
Documind parses documents against schemas designed for logistics operations and extracts the fields you need:
- Reference numbers: Booking number, B/L number, AWB number, CMR number
- Parties: Shipper, Consignee, Notify Party (including multiple notify parties)
- Routing: Origin, Destination, Transshipment points, Place of Receipt, Place of Delivery
- Cargo details: Container/unit numbers, package counts, gross weight, commodity codes, dimensions
- Special cargo: Dangerous goods classifications, temperature requirements, oversized cargo dimensions
Each extracted field comes with a confidence score. Your automation can use these scores to decide what flows through automatically and what gets routed for human review.
Business Rule Validation
Before your automation pushes data to the ERP, Documind can validate against your business rules:
- Party identification: Is the shipper a freight forwarder? Does the email domain match the shipper name?
- Document type detection: Original B/L, Sea Waybill, or Express Release? Air Waybill or House AWB?
- Reference format validation: Do booking numbers follow your prefix conventions?
- Country-specific requirements: Are mandatory fields present for the destination country?
- Customer matching: Can the instruction be linked to an existing customer record?
Validation results are returned as structured output, ready for your automation to act on.
Handling Complex Scenarios
Logistics documents come with edge cases. Documind handles them and surfaces the relevant data:
Dangerous Goods: UN numbers, proper shipping names, hazard classes, packing groups, and emergency contact information are extracted from DG declarations across all transport modes.
Temperature-Controlled Cargo: Whether it’s reefer containers for ocean freight or temperature-controlled air cargo, Documind captures temperature settings, ventilation requirements, and acceptable ranges.
Oversized Cargo: Out-of-gauge dimensions for ocean, heavy/oversized declarations for air, and exceptional load specifications for road transport are all captured for downstream processing.
Revisions: When Documind processes a document with the same reference number as a previous instruction, it flags this as a revision. Your automation can then update existing records rather than creating duplicates.
Exception Scenarios
Some scenarios should always involve human judgment. Documind identifies these so your automation can route them appropriately:
- Reference numbers that don’t match between email metadata and document content
- Restricted cargo types for specific destinations
- Container or unit specifications that don’t match the booking
- Missing mandatory fields for the destination country
- Low confidence scores on critical data points
Your automation layer decides how to handle these: queue for review, send for approval, or escalate to specific teams.
The Outcome
By using Documind for document intelligence in your shipping instruction workflow:
- Processing time drops: From 15-20 minutes per instruction to seconds for data extraction
- Errors decrease: Structured extraction eliminates transcription mistakes
- Throughput increases: Documents are processed as they arrive, not when staff is available
- Compliance improves: Country-specific rules are validated consistently
- Audit trails exist: Every extraction includes confidence scores and field-level source references
For logistics operations processing hundreds of instructions daily across ocean, air, and road shipments, this means significant capacity freed up for customer service and exception handling.
Ready to Add Document Intelligence to Your Workflow?
Documind extracts structured, validated data from shipping instructions across all transport modes. Integrate it with your existing automation (RPA, custom code, or workflow tools) to build end-to-end processing that scales.