The delivery order arrives by email. An agent enters it.
TIO enters warehousing paperwork. An agent reads the delivery order, creates the entry in your TMS with charge lines attached, and sends a review email that shows every field. TIO does not run a warehouse management system. When your team corrects the agent, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation.
Warehousing: the work, one job at a time.
Order Entry Agent
Reads the bills and the packing list and creates the lot or delivery order in your TMS, charge lines included.
- On its own
- Creates the record and sends it for review
- Goes to a person
- A party it cannot match, a document that contradicts another
- Status
- In production at a US import forwarder
Example panels with sample steps on illustrative footage. Not a live feed.
What does warehousing paperwork actually lose to data entry?
Hours, in pieces small enough that nobody logs them. A delivery order lands in a shared inbox. Someone opens it, reads the consignee, the ship-to, the piece count, the weight, the special instructions, then switches to the system and types it in, field by field. Then the charge lines. Then the next one. None of it is hard, and all of it is slow, and it scales with the number of orders rather than with the size of the team.
The delivery order entry described here is the same order entry that runs in production at a US import forwarder today, where lot creation ran about 30 minutes a job by hand. Across 25+ jobs a week, that was roughly two days of one person's week spent reading documents and typing their contents into fields. The agent took both to seconds, and each record goes to a person for review. A 3PL keying delivery orders has the same problem in different documents.
How does the order entry agent handle a delivery order?
It reads the document, creates the entry, and sends it for review. The loop runs in five steps:
The document arrives as it always has
A delivery order, bill of lading, or packing list lands in the mailbox the agent has access to. Your customer keeps sending it the way they do today.
The agent reads it
It works from the document rather than a fixed template. It resolves the parties, the ship-to, piece counts, weights, and dimensions. A party it cannot match goes to a person.
It creates the entry
The agent creates the entry in your TMS with the charge lines attached, carrying the job to a finished record rather than handing you a spreadsheet to key in.
Your team reviews it
The agent sends a review email that shows every field. A person checks it against the source document.
Your correction becomes a rule
When your team corrects the agent, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation: a consignee, a customer, the way your team writes a reference number. TIO’s team writes each rule with you.
How is this different from the usual answers?
Warehouse teams have tried several ways to solve entry volume. Here is where an agent sits against the alternatives:
| What it does | Where it stops | |
|---|---|---|
| Another hire | Keys the entries correctly | Cost scales one-for-one with order volume, and the next growth step needs the next hire |
| Offshore data entry | Moves the keystrokes off your team | The errors, the latency, and the management overhead stay with you |
| OCR / scanning | Extracts text from a known template | Hands you fields to key in, and an unfamiliar format breaks it |
| A TIO agent | Reads the document and creates the entry with charge lines | Sends the entry to your team for review. Anything outside your rules goes to a person |
Which other agents sit next to this one?
Start with the one that removes the most hours today and add the others as the work demands them.
Order entry
Reads the delivery order or bill of lading and creates the entry in your TMS with charge lines, then sends a review email that shows every field. This is the agent behind the workflow on this page.
Quoting
Quote agents for LTL and truckload run in production at a US trucking agency. They read the rate request, pull live carrier rates, and reply in the customer’s thread. A quote under your price ceiling goes out on its own. Anything over it goes to a person.
Finance
Matches each line of a vendor invoice to the job’s charges and books the payable. Lines that do not match go on a list for your team. It does not pay.
Customs, if you touch it
If your operation handles import freight, an agent prepares filing data as a draft for a licensed person on your team to review and file. TIO never files.
Your TMS stays the system of record. Each action has its own setting: it runs on its own, goes to your team for review, or waits for your team’s reply. Meet the agents →
Straight answers.
What do AI agents do for a 3PL?
An AI agent reads the inbound delivery order or shipping document, pulls out the parties, addresses, piece counts, weights, and charges, and creates the entry in your TMS, with charge lines attached. It then sends a review email that shows every field, and a person on your team checks it. TIO enters the paperwork. It does not run a warehouse management system. In production at a US import freight forwarder, the same order entry agent took entry work from about 30 minutes per job to seconds across 25+ jobs a week.
Do I have to replace my TMS or WMS to use AI agents?
No. TIO replaces neither. Your TMS stays the system of record. TIO works through an adapter built for your TMS, and adapters are in production for two TMS platforms. TIO does not run a warehouse management system, so your WMS keeps doing its job. For any other system, including a WMS, we first check what it lets an agent read and write. Then we scope the job.
How is this different from OCR or a document scanner?
OCR extracts text and hands you fields to key in yourself. It also needs a consistent template, and a delivery order from a new customer in an unfamiliar format breaks it. A TIO agent reads the document for meaning rather than position, carries the work to a finished entry with charge lines, and sends what it cannot match to a person instead of guessing.
How long before an agent is useful on my delivery orders?
A first agent starts as a scoped pilot on your own delivery orders. What takes time is the adapter for your TMS and your rules for the job, so timing depends on your TMS and the job. The agent goes live one action at a time, when it matches your team’s work on real shipments. When your team corrects the agent, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation: your customers, your consignees, your conventions. It is a rule, not model training.
Does an agent ever create an entry without a person approving it?
Yes. The order entry agent creates the entry in your TMS first and sends a review email that shows every field, so your team checks it after it exists. If the agent cannot match a party, or two documents contradict each other, it stops and sends the question to a person. TMS write permissions are configured by action and customer; a configured action can be disabled without disabling the others.
See it on your own shipments.
Bring a real document and watch an agent take it to a finished draft while you’re on the call.
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