Inbox-to-TMS automation for freight forwarders.
A booking arrives. An agent reads it, finds the job, and pre-fills the TMS record. Pre-alert, B/L, carrier update, the same read every time. Your team reviews and approves. That is the whole workflow.
The gap between the email and the record is a person.
Today a team member reads the booking confirmation, opens the TMS you already run, finds the job, and types the fields in by hand. Then does it again for the pre-alert, and again for the B/L. Every booking, rate response, agent update, and shipper question hits the inbox first. Run real volume and the inbox stops being a mailbox and becomes the bottleneck.
Read, route, pre-fill, and wait for your approval.
Every email read and routed
Booking confirmations, agent updates, carrier responses, shipper questions. Each message is read, identified, and routed to the right job. No one sorts the inbox by hand.
Fields extracted, record pre-filled
A booking confirmation pre-fills the lot. A pre-alert stages the update. Every field carries a confidence score and the source text behind it, for your team to review.
A queue, not an inbox
Your team works a prioritized action list: pre-fills ready to approve, documents missing, deadlines approaching. The inbox is no longer the operating layer.
Ask anything, get an answer
Container status, quote history, document receipt, email threads. The agent answers from everything it has read, with the source cited. No TMS navigation, no inbox search.
From email in to reviewed record, step by step.
An email arrives
A booking, pre-alert, carrier rate, or arrival notice lands in your shared inbox. Nothing about how your team receives mail changes.
The agent classifies it
It identifies the email type and resolves the sender, including overseas agents writing in inconsistent formats.
It binds to the right job
The message is tied to the correct open lot, matched on booking reference, container, bill of lading, or shipper, with no manual sorting.
It extracts and pre-fills
The relevant fields are pulled with a confidence score and the source text for each, so review is a check, not a re-type.
Your team reviews
The operator checks the pre-filled fields against the source, corrects anything flagged low-confidence, and approves.
The approved data writes
It posts through the TMS API. The TMS stays the system of record. No customs filing submits, and no record the agents draft is written, without a person approving it first.
It is not a document parser you feed one PDF at a time, and it is not a TMS replacement. It handles the flow of work between the inbox and the TMS you already run, and connects to any inbox on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace in days, not weeks.
Straight answers.
What is inbox-to-TMS automation?
Closing the gap between a shipment email arriving and the TMS record existing. An ocean job generates 5 to 8 emails that each need TMS entry: the booking, the pre-alert, the bills, the arrival notice, the updates. Today a person reads each one and keys it in. Inbox-to-TMS automation means an agent does the reading, routing, and pre-filling, and your team reviews and approves the record.
How does the agent know which job an email belongs to?
It binds the message to the open lot on the identifiers freight already runs on: booking reference, container number, bill of lading, or shipper. An overseas agent writing in an inconsistent format still lands on the right job, with 0 manual inbox sorting. Ambiguous matches are flagged for a person instead of guessed.
What happens when the agent reads a field wrong?
Your reviewer catches it, because every extracted field carries a confidence score and the source text beside it. The correction takes seconds, the record writes correctly, and the fix becomes a rule the agent keeps, so the same mistake does not come back next week. No record the agent drafts writes to the TMS until that review happens.
Which inboxes and TMS platforms does this work with?
Any inbox on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, connected in days rather than weeks, and the TMS you already run through its API. The TMS stays the system of record; TIO adds the reading layer in front of it. At the US import forwarder in production, that layer turned about 30 minutes of keying per lot into a review that takes seconds.
See it turn a real email into a record.
Twenty minutes, no setup. Bring a real document and watch an agent take it to a finished draft while you’re on the call.
Book a demo