Inbox-to-TMS automation for freight forwarders.
A house bill and a packing list arrive. An agent reads them and creates the lot or delivery order in your TMS, charge lines included. It sends your team a review email that shows every field. Sorting a whole shared mailbox by shipment is inbox triage, which is in pilot.
- 01Email and attachments
- 02Fields readby an agentA required fact is missingthe agent asks once
- 03Record writtenthrough your TMS adapter
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 the documents, create the record, send it for review.
Inbox triage, in pilot
Sorts a shared mailbox by what each email is, which shipment it belongs to, and who should handle it. In pilot, it sorts in the background and nothing is sent.
Records created, every field shown
The order entry agent reads the bills and the packing list and creates the lot or delivery order in your TMS, charge lines included. The review email shows every field for your team to check.
Exceptions go to a person
A party the agent cannot match, or a document that contradicts another, goes to a person with the facts already attached. The audit agent re-checks finished records against their source documents and reports each difference with its cause.
Ask about a load
Your staff email a question about a load and get the status, the details, and the document back. The Ops Agent reads; it does not change an order.
From documents 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 reads the documents
It reads the master bill, house bill, packing list or delivery order that came with the email.
It matches the parties
It matches the parties on the documents. A party it cannot match goes to a person.
It creates the record
It pulls the fields and creates the lot or delivery order, charge lines included. The review email shows every field, so review is a check, not a re-type.
Your team reviews
A person on your team checks the record against the source and corrects anything wrong.
Your TMS stays the record
The agent writes to your TMS through the adapter built for it. Write permissions are configured by action and customer, and the agent write-event journal is protected from application edits and deletion. A customs filing is always filed by a person.
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 your TMS, through an adapter built for that TMS. A first agent starts as a scoped pilot on your own documents.
Where the work happens.
All solutions
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 and the keying. Each action has its own setting: the record goes to your team for review, or it waits for a person's reply. Matching every email in a shared mailbox to its shipment is inbox triage, which is in pilot.
How does the agent know which job an email belongs to?
Matching an email to its shipment is inbox triage, and it is in pilot today. In the pilot, the agent sorts a shared mailbox in the background by what each email is, which shipment it belongs to, and who should handle it. Nothing is sent. The order entry agent, which is in production, works from the documents it is given: a master bill, house bill, packing list or delivery order. A party it cannot match goes to a person.
What happens when the agent reads a field wrong?
Your reviewer catches it, because the review email shows every field. The correction takes seconds. When your team corrects an agent, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation. A document that contradicts another goes to a person instead of a guess.
Which inboxes and TMS platforms does this work with?
TIO works through an adapter built for each TMS. Adapters are in production for two TMS platforms and for email inboxes. For any other system, TIO first checks what it lets an agent read and write, then scopes the job. A first agent starts as a scoped pilot on your own documents. We need access to the mailbox, sample documents, and a login to your TMS. Your TMS stays the system of record. At the US import forwarder in production, the order entry agent turned about 30 minutes of keying per lot into a review that takes seconds.
See it turn a real email into a record.
Bring a real document and watch an agent take it to a finished draft while you’re on the call.
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