Back to blog Automation of forwarding operations: utilising AI and OCR in handling emails, quotes and documentation
Day by day, approximately 6.5 million trucks move across European roads, transporting nearly 80% of all land freight within the European Union. Managing such a vast fleet generates equally vast amounts of correspondence and documentation, including requests for quotes, offers, transport documents, invoices, official letters and fines. As operations scale up, document management becomes an ever-greater challenge, particularly for emails landing in corporate inboxes. In large companies, the volume of emails can exceed 1,000 per day! Manual handling of correspondence consumes a tremendous amount of time and increases the risk of errors, which can lead to delays and financial losses.
How to manage email overload, dispersed information and an increasing volume of customer inquiries?
Companies in the transport, shipping and logistics (TSL) sectors receive hundreds, sometimes thousands, of emails every day. These inboxes contain not only enquiries and requests for quotes but also crucial official documents, invoices, and transport documentation. Many of these messages require immediate action, and missing them can delay logistical processes, reduce efficiency, lead to lost revenue opportunities or even expose the company to financial losses.
Examples of such emails include:
- Invoices and transport documents – must be quickly filtered out from other correspondence and directed to the relevant departments;
- Quotes and pricing inquiries – requiring prompt responses to avoid losing potential clients to competitors;
- Official letters – often time-sensitive and demanding immediate attention.
Manual handling of large volumes of emails is inefficient. Employees spend hours filtering, categorising and forwarding emails which, in the long run, results in significant delays and errors.
Automation of email management in TSL: intelligent AI and OCR solutions
Artificial intelligence (AI) combined with optical character recognition (OCR) technology simplifies and automates the email handling process. AI can analyse email content, automatically categorise documents and direct them to the appropriate systems or departments. This occurs without the need for human intervention or reduces the human role to a simple operator function (confirming or rejecting actions).
How does it work in practice?
Automatic reading and classification of attachments and emails
Artificial intelligence equipped with OCR can read and interpret the content of emails and attachments (such as invoices or transport documents), extracting key information and automatically directing it to the relevant individuals or systems.
Classification and routing of documents to relevant departments
Once the content is read, AI classifies messages based on their content: invoices are sent to the accounting department, transport documents to logistics and official letters to the legal department – eliminating the need for manual intervention.
Automatic responses to enquiries
AI can automatically respond to requests for quotes, sending initial information to the client or forwarding them to the sales department for further handling. Algorithms allow for personalised responses, mimicking the communication style of employees.
Automatic data entry into company systems
For invoices or other accounting documents, AI can automatically input data into ERP, TMS or CRM systems, significantly reducing the time required for manual data entry.
Benefits of implementing AI in email management for the TSL industry
Time savings
By automating email handling processes, companies can reduce the time required to process messages by up to 80%. Tasks that once took hours can now be completed by AI in mere seconds. Automatically directing invoices to accounting or transport documents to the logistics department frees employees from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic responsibilities.
Error elimination
Manually transferring data from emails carries the risk of human errors, which in the TSL industry can lead to delays and customer issues. AI eliminates this risk factor, ensuring high quality and consistency in data entry. With continuous improvements to AI models, even rare exceptions will require progressively less human intervention.
Faster Response to Enquiries
Automation enables instant responses to requests for quotes and other critical messages. With replies sent within as little as two minutes, companies gain a competitive edge and improve their chances of securing new contracts. Sometimes, it’s the immediate response that wins the sale.
Relieving Employees
Automating routine tasks, such as categorising messages and directing them to the relevant departments, relieves employees, allowing them to focus on more creative and demanding tasks.
Manually recording and entering data into systems is time-consuming, costly and prone to errors. With AI, data entry from documents is completed in seconds, reducing the human role to verifying data accuracy, which enhances the efficiency of the entire team.
Scalability
As a company grows, artificial intelligence provides flexible scalability for processes. Regardless of the volume of emails arriving in the inbox, AI effectively manages any workload, eliminating the need to hire additional staff. Data entry from orders – just like with invoices – is reduced to mere minutes, with the role of the operator limited to verifying data accuracy. This allows the company to process several times more orders with the same team.
Automation of forwarding operations: are AI and OCR the future of the TSL Industry?
The use of artificial intelligence and intelligent OCR in email management represents the future for the TSL industry. Process automation allows companies to save time and resources while enhancing the efficiency of handling essential documents. In the long term, these solutions provide tangible financial and operational benefits, enabling transport, shipping and logistics companies to focus on expanding their services.
Based on completed projects, we estimate that applying AI technology along with intelligent OCR can reduce document and email processing times by over 80%. From a business perspective, this means freeing up significant human resources from monotonous tasks and redirecting them toward more ambitious and demanding activities.
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