How a UK forwarder is taking the retyping out of shipment intake

The forwarder moves time-critical freight for customers around the world, including parts for aircraft that are grounded until they arrive. Almost every shipment starts the same way: an email to a shared inbox, with a commercial invoice, a packing list, a purchase order or an instruction letter attached, in whatever layout the customer happens to use.

Before a job can exist in CargoWise, someone has to open each one and key the details across by hand: parties, references, weights, dimensions, values, incoterms, dangerous-goods flags. None of it is hard. It is just slow, and it sits in front of every job the team runs.

Relay connects through Microsoft Graph to two scoped mailboxes, one for imports and one for exports, and reads nothing else in the tenant. It reads the email body and every attachment together, works out what each document is, and pulls out the agreed field set for that type.

Every field comes back with a confidence score and a link to the page it was read from. When two documents disagree on a value, Relay flags the conflict rather than quietly picking one, and a scan it can't read goes straight to a person with the original attached.

Below the confidence bar, a field waits for a person. Relay never writes to CargoWise on its own: its output feeds the minimum-requirements check and job creation in Dispatch, and later the customs audit in Clearance, so the whole programme reads each document once.

The build is running now on test copies of the two mailboxes, against real sample documents from the forwarder's SharePoint. Accuracy and time saved go on this page once they've signed off user acceptance testing.