case Study | SUPPLY CHAIN & LOGISTICS
Automating Bill of Lading Generation
Our solution turns hours of manual document handling into an automated workflow that completes in under a minute.
< 1 min
to generate a Bill of Lading, down from hours
92%
reduction in documentation errors
60%
reduction in operational headcount required
One document. Six sources. Hundreds of times a month.
In global logistics, the Bill of Lading is one of the most critical documents in the shipping process, and one of the most tedious to produce. For freight forwarders and shipping companies handling hundreds of shipments a month, preparing each one manually drains time, inflates operational costs, and introduces costly errors.
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Generating a Bill of Lading requires data collected from a wide range of shipping documents: the Commercial Invoice, Packing List, Notice of Arrival, Purchase Order, Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), and more. Each arrives in a different format, from a different party, and every field has to be carefully checked and re-entered by operations staff.
The process is slow, repetitive, and highly error-prone. A single mistyped container number or misread weight can lead to shipment delays, customs holds, and disputes with carriers and customers. At hundreds of Bills of Lading every month, the cost in time, money, and rework becomes significant; scaling the operation means scaling the headcount along with it.
01 Solution
One portal in. One Bill of Lading out.
A booking portal integrated with our solution lets customers request a quotation, place a booking, and submit every required shipping document in one place. From there, our system takes over.
01
Fetch.
The solution automatically retrieves the documents submitted by the customer through the booking portal. Nothing is chased over email.
02
Classify.
Each document is intelligently identified and classified by type: Commercial Invoice, Packing List, Notice of Arrival, Purchase Order, MSDS, and more.
03
Extract.
Shipper and consignee details, cargo descriptions, quantities, weights, and hazardous material data are extracted from each document with no manual data entry.
04
Generate.
The extracted information is pushed back to the booking portal, assembled automatically, and displayed as a ready-to-use Bill of Lading.
What was once a manual, multi-document reconciliation exercise now happens automatically in the background, with staff stepping in only to review and approve.
02 The impact
< 1 minute
to generate a Bill of Lading, down from hours of manual document checking and data entry, accelerating the entire booking-to-shipment cycle.
92% fewer errors
Automated classification and extraction eliminate the manual data-entry mistakes that cause shipment delays and disputes.
60% less headcount
Hundreds of Bills of Lading are processed with a fraction of the operational staff, freeing teams to focus on higher-value work.
One portal
Customers get quotations, bookings, and shipping documents through a single seamless experience.
Why Sentient Concepts Solutions.
Shipping documentation doesn't follow a template; every customer, carrier, and country does it differently. Our solution is built to handle that variability, reading and understanding documents the way a trained operations specialist would, but at machine speed and scale.
For logistics providers, that means less time chasing paperwork and more time moving freight.