The Business Need
The client was a UK based maritime corporation offering port services like cargo handling, operations, navigation, fleet management, warehousing, and logistical support.
Their services covered over 200 ports worldwide and received around 10K+ port lineup emails every day with multiple attachments. The mail attachments were in various types and formats, ranging from PDF, Excel, spreadsheets to HTML and XML files. Business-critical data points like ship position, vessel details, port schedules, port specifications, vessel compliance, and more.
Manual ways of mail interpretation were found to be tedious and time-consuming. Hence Mobius was sought by the company to give an automated way of extracting the mandatory data points from the unstructured data input.
How we solved the problem
MobiEbot was customized to extract critical attributes from the emails from the client environment. Our shipment and cargo container tracking email bots parsed around 40 emails per minute. NER and NLP rules were applied to extract more than 80 port related data points. Since each document type had its structure, our shipment and cargo container tracking email bots were customized depending on the training set data. A quality benchmarking process is carried out by experts fortnightly to determine the accuracy of the extracted data. Improvements were made to the extraction rules based on the findings uncovered in the benchmarking process.
Results
Critical port information was extracted within minutes. As challenging as it was to make sense out of the mounds of the emails in near real-time, Mobius achieved 100% automation in processing the shipping brokerage emails. With periodical benchmarking of the extracted output, an accuracy of 85% was achieved surpassing other automated solutions offered in the market. 24/7 monitoring services enabled the charterers for real-time route planning and freight transportation. The operators were relieved from mundane tasks like searching through heaps of email attachments.