Making Waves with AI: Ensure Smooth Sailing by Automating Shipping Document Processing

The year is 1424. You’re shipping goods across the world, and the ship in question gives you a bill of lading. It’s a piece of paper containing details about what your goods are, where you’re shipping them from, and where they’re headed.

Fast forward to 2024. You’re shipping your goods across the world, and the shipping company gives you a bill of lading. It’s still (most likely) a piece of paper. Yes, centuries have passed, but a lot of shipping documents are still paper-based. In fact, shipping is so document-dependent that a single shipment can require 50 sheets of paper to be physically exchanged between up to 30 stakeholders.

Nevertheless, the tide is turning. With the increasing digitization of shipping documents, the process of handling and integrating data from various sources (bills of lading, packing slips, delivery receipts, etc.) is becoming more streamlined. Modern solutions have made it easier to extract and seamlessly integrate this data into ERP systems, even when dealing with inconsistent document formats.

Thanks to AI, processing shipping documents is getting a whole lot easier. By automating unstructured document processing for your shipping docs, you can unlock a treasure trove of insights sea-mlessly. (See what we did there?)

Automate document processing and save up to 95% of your time | Astera

Precious Cargo: Finding Valuable Insights with AI-Powered Document Processing

Shipping documentation today involves many documents and processes, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive for all stakeholders. As a result, insights might sink to the bottom of the ocean undiscovered (read: locked away in a filing cabinet).

Relying on manual approaches isn’t feasible either because of the sheer volume and variability of documents. Any insights you extract are yesterday’s news.

So, to extract timely and actionable insights from your shipping documents, you need an efficient, adaptable, and scalable solution that can extract relevant insights from your unstructured shipping documents in real-time.

Swimming in a sea of documents? Astera to the rescue!

Astera automates your document processing so you can focus on high value-adding tasks.

Book a free demo to see how!

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is an umbrella term for technologies that automate manual data entry from paper-based docs, scanned images, PDFs, etc. Here’s an overview of its impact:

• Accuracy: IDP ensures data is captured accurately, with AI ironing out kinks and fixing errors such as spelling mistakes or incorrect date formats. In fact, IDP solutions can improve data extraction rates by ten times while maintaining an accuracy level of 99.9%.
• Speed: By automating data extraction, IDP streamlines operations and converts shipping documents into relevant insights in seconds.
• Adaptability: IDP eliminates the need for predefined templates, so you can cater to any unstructured document that shipping throws your way.
• Intelligence: AI enables intelligent identification and extraction of relevant data across multiple formats, such as Excel, PDF, JSON, and delimited files. All you have to do is specify the fields you need, and it handles the rest.
• Simplicity: Considering the number of stakeholders involved, shipping datasets can get complicated real AI-powered IDP can handle different file types and connect the dots using AI-driven and rule-based mapping to simplify your complex datasets.
• Integrity: Feeling uneasy at the thought of automating your document processing? AI-powered IDP also offers brisk validation features to ensure data integrity.
• Cost-Reduction & Productivity: AI-powered IDP also offers cost-reduction and productivity benefits by minimizing errors and improving efficiency. In fact, IDP reduces data extraction time by 80%, reduces resource consumption by 50%, and speeds up document processing by 8 times.

Automating your document processing using AI has clear business benefits, making it a worthwhile investment | Astera

Bon Voyage: Automate your shipping documents with Astera Intelligence

Shipping documents are part and parcel (pun intended!) of the supply chain in almost all industries. Automating your shipping document processing allows you to improve data accuracy, increase efficiency, and extract revenue-generating insights from your data.

Astera’s AI-powered IDP is a fast, reliable, and scalable approach to automating the extraction and processing of unstructured shipping documents. By leveraging our AI, you can transform unstructured shipping data into valuable insights for timely and effective data-driven decision-making. Our template-less data extraction capabilities make sure you process docs with varying layouts without missing a beat.

Don’t miss the boat! Sign up now for a free guided tour of our new-gen solution.