Extract shipment details from email bodies
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How to automate extract shipment details from email body
With constant carrier emails flowing into your team's inbox, keeping up with shipment updates (and ensuring that data is accurately copied and pasted into internal systems) is a massive drain on productivity for any team managing shipments at scale. This challenge is amplified when we consider the fact that no two carriers send consistently formatted updates — resulting in a standardization challenge post-extraction.
With Parabola's email ingestion, AI extraction and standardization steps, you can consistently pull key shipment details from email bodies including container numbers, origin and destination cities, ports, estimated departure and arrival dates, total shipment weight, and included items. Beyond using Parabola for email extraction, you can also design a custom workflow to map extracted data to your internal format — handling things like reformatting dates, standardizing carrier names, and mapping data to internal IDs across systems.
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Why Parabola
The value Parabola has added to internal reporting and preparing workflows at Flexport is huge. We've seen such a dramatic reduction in our cost to serve since implementing, and Parabola has been a key partner in our quest to reduce cost to serve and performance transparency.
Extracting shipment data from emails involves automatically identifying and pulling key shipping information—such as order number, shipment date, pickup and delivery locations, and shipping method—from email bodies. This eliminates the need for manual data entry, improving speed and accuracy in logistics workflows.
- Use the Pull from inbound email step to ingest emails containing shipment details.
- After pulling in your email data, use an Extract with AI step and configure it to recognize key shipment fields like container number, origin and destination cities, departure and arrival ports, estimated shipment dates, and total weight.
- Standardize and clean extracted data using steps like Edit columns, Standardize with AI, and Format dates.
- Consider validating extracted data by setting rules in an Add if/else column step to flag missing or inconsistent values.
- Route cleaned shipment details into a TMS, ERP, Google Sheet, or any other system by adding a step like Send to API or Send to Google Sheets.
- Consider setting up an auto-forwarding rule to have shipment update emails flow automatically into Parabola.
- When configuring Extract with AI, provide clear prompts and sample data to improve accuracy when pulling shipment details.
- Use Standardize with AI to normalize location names, carrier codes, and other shipment attributes for consistency across systems.
- Implement an error-handling step, like Filter rows, to flag or correct missing shipment details before sending them to downstream systems.
- Combine extracted email data with other datasets in Parabola to enhance shipment tracking and analysis.
- To start building your email extraction Flow, use the Template above and check out Parabola University lesson on pulling data from emails.
- Learn more about how to set up an auto-forwarding rule in Parabola here.
