Freight orders

Incoming order automation is a common issue in the logistics industry. The process of receiving and processing orders is often manual and time-consuming, done either by dispatchers or by dedicated order entry staff. Despite its tedious nature, it is critical for generating revenue and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Common challenges

• Significant portion of information is not explicitly stated in the order, relying on employee experience
• Variety of formats: orders are sent per email, as PDF, text documents, Excel spreadsheets
• One document can one or multiple orders (often 10+), each with two or more stops
• The process can be time-critical, especially for same-day and next-day orders
• Lack of standardized terminology for packaging types, delivery terms, avis requirements etc.
• Documents are often generated by older systems with complex formatting

Shortcoming of previous-generation solutions

• Difficulties with complex data structures and line items
• Significant labelling efforts required to train the systems
• Solutions cannot accommodate user feedback, requiring manual intervention in the process

Solution with Clerk

A reliable and comprehensive solution can be achieved by combining Clerk’s email AI, classification, extraction and augmentation capabilities. Clerk recognizes freight orders in the inbox, classifies the customer, extracts order details considering the customer’s specific requirements, and augments the data with additional information (such as company codes, standard agreements, comments etc.) based on previous order history. The complete process typically takes less than a minute to get a set of clean, structured and augmented data which can be used in the TMS or ERP system.