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DataBot Document Processing

What is DataBot?

DataBot is TMS.ai's intelligent document processing system that converts rate confirmations, rate sheets, and freight documents into orders and structured data. Instead of manually typing information from PDFs, emails, or images into your TMS, DataBot uses optical character recognition (OCR) and AI to automatically read documents and create orders or populate rate tables. You can email rate confirmations directly to TMS.ai, upload documents through the platform, or even photograph documents with your mobile device, and DataBot extracts the relevant information and builds complete orders ready for review.

DataBot handles the full spectrum of documents your operation receives. Rate confirmations from customers become draft orders with all pickup, delivery, commodity, and pricing details pre-filled. Customer rate sheets transform into loaded rate tables without manual entry. Bills of lading are processed to validate shipment details. The system recognizes common freight document layouts and learns your customer-specific formats, understanding not just individual data points but the relationships between rates, lanes, and accessorial charges.

How DataBot works:

  1. Document intake: Users submit documents through multiple channels including forwarding emails with attachments to a dedicated DataBot email address, uploading files directly in the TMS.ai interface, or capturing photos of documents using the mobile app. DataBot accepts PDFs, images (PNG, JPG), Excel files, and scanned documents.
  2. Document analysis: DataBot scans the uploaded document using OCR technology to convert all text, tables, and structured data into machine-readable format. The AI analyzes the document layout to understand sections, headers, data relationships, and contextual meaning based on freight industry patterns.
  3. Information extraction: Based on document type, DataBot identifies and extracts relevant information. For rate confirmations, this includes order reference numbers, shipper and consignee names and addresses, pickup and delivery dates and times, commodity descriptions with weights and dimensions, special handling instructions, and rate amounts with accessorials. For rate sheets, DataBot extracts origin-destination lane pairs, base rates and rate tiers, fuel surcharge formulas, accessorial pricing, and effective date ranges.
  4. Data structuring: Extracted information is automatically mapped to the appropriate TMS.ai objects. For rate confirmations, DataBot creates a draft order with all stops, commodities, and charges populated. For rate sheets, the system creates or updates rate table entries. Customer names are matched to existing customer records, addresses are geocoded and validated, and rates are associated with correct lanes.
  5. Review and approval: DataBot presents extracted data in the TMS.ai interface for verification. High-confidence extractions appear with all fields populated and ready for quick approval. Lower-confidence items are flagged with highlights or warnings indicating which specific fields need human verification, allowing your team to focus attention where it's most needed.
  6. Order activation: Once approved, draft orders created by DataBot transition to active status and flow into your dispatch and planning workflows. Rate table updates go live immediately, available for quoting and customer pricing. The system maintains an audit trail linking each data point back to its source document.

What it means for you:

DataBot eliminates the bottleneck of manual order entry from documents. Rate confirmations that previously took 5-10 minutes to manually transcribe now process in 30 seconds of review time. Your team handles 10-15x more order volume per person, allowing your brokerage to scale revenue without proportional increases in data entry staff. Operations that were processing 50 orders per day per person now handle 200+ orders with the same team size.

Rate sheet processing transforms from hours to minutes. Loading a new customer rate sheet with hundreds of lanes that previously required a full day of manual entry now completes in 10-15 minutes. You can onboard new customers faster, update pricing more frequently to stay competitive, and respond to rate change notifications from customers on the same day you receive them rather than weeks later.

Accuracy improves dramatically across both orders and rates. Manual transcription of complex documents produces errors in 2-5% of entries (transposed numbers, wrong addresses, missed accessorials, incorrect rate tiers). DataBot's AI-powered extraction maintains consistency across high-volume processing. When you do need to correct an extraction, DataBot learns from that correction, improving accuracy on similar documents going forward. This reduces downstream problems from incorrect orders, pricing disputes, and time spent fixing mistakes.