The operation
This forwarder handles ocean and air import shipments across multiple trade lanes: Europe to the US East Coast, Latin America to Gulf ports, and Asia-Pacific into the West Coast. The back-office team manages all job documentation, coordinates with a licensed customs broker for CBP submissions, and tracks lots through their TMS from booking through delivery.
Roughly 200 jobs per month. Fifteen-plus staff touch every job at some point: operations processing the booking confirmation, compliance reviewing the filing, accounting reconciling the charge invoice, supervisors checking lot status. The shared workflow: a group email inbox, a shared spreadsheet for tracking open jobs, and manual TMS data entry for every lot. That combination works until volume picks up and people start missing things.
The problem wasn't that the process was broken. It worked. The problem was that it was consuming 40 to 60 hours of back-office time per month on data entry that a computer should be able to do.
The workflow before TIO
The pre-TIO workflow looked like this:
- Booking confirmation arrives from the freight agent or factory
- Team member opens the email, identifies carrier, vessel, ETD, container
- Team member opens attached commercial invoice and packing list PDFs
- Team member identifies shipper, consignee, manufacturer, HTS code, country of origin
- Team member opens their TMS, creates a new lot, enters all fields
- Team reviews and submits the lot
Steps 2 through 5 averaged 45 minutes for a clean, well-organized booking. For messier emails (attachments with inconsistent formats, follow-up emails needed to confirm the manufacturer vs. trading company), it could run 90 minutes or more.
What changed with TIO
TIO connected to the team's Outlook inbox via Microsoft Graph API. When a booking confirmation arrived, TIO extracted the job fields automatically and presented them in the review interface.
The team's new workflow: open the TIO review screen, check each extracted field against the confidence score and source text, correct any flagged fields, approve. TIO then created the lot in the TMS via API. The team never had to open the TMS for the initial lot creation.
The first test used a real booking email from one of their regular freight agents. TIO extracted 9 of 10 fields correctly on the first pass. The one field that needed correction (a manufacturer vs. trading company disambiguation) was flagged with a low confidence score and a note showing the source text.
The compliance posture
The filer of record remained unchanged throughout the evaluation. TIO did not change the CBP filing path or the broker relationship. The team reviewed every extraction before approving lot creation in the TMS. TIO enforces this review step. There is no path to TMS lot creation that bypasses team approval.
The audit log captured every state change: email received, extraction run, field edited, lot creation approved, TMS lot number returned. The team found this useful for demonstrating process documentation to their customers.
Where TIO is today
This forwarder is an active TIO customer. The production deployment is in progress. Numbers above reflect the evaluation period and will be updated as the deployment matures.
Early customers get locked pricing for the first year and the AI query interface: plain-English queries over all job data, email history, and lot status without opening your TMS.