Automating bill of lading and shipping document processing for 500+ daily shipments

The operations team processed over 500 shipments daily, each accompanied by 2-4 documents: bills of lading, commercial invoices, packing lists, and occasionally customs declarations. Six full-time clerks manually entered shipment data — origin, destination, weight, piece count, commodity codes, consignee details — into their TMS. Peak season backlogs of 2-3 days meant shipments sat at docks without proper documentation in the system, leading to detention charges and customer complaints.

DocumentIQ was configured with fields covering all four document types: shipper/consignee name and address, origin/destination, weight, dimensions, piece count, HS commodity codes, and special handling instructions. The team used annotations extensively on bills of lading, where the same fields appeared in different positions depending on the carrier template. The 3-mode chat let dispatchers query shipment data in real time — "Which shipments to Dallas are over 10,000 lbs this week?" — without waiting for reports.

• 500+ shipments processed daily with under 2 minutes total document handling per shipment
• Data entry team reduced from 6 clerks to 1 reviewer for exception handling
• Peak season backlogs eliminated — same-day processing achieved year-round
• Detention charges reduced by 40% due to faster documentation turnaround
• 91% extraction accuracy across all document types on first run