BolScan: AI-Powered OCR for Automated Bill of Lading Extraction
BolScan is a specialized Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution built to digitize the global shipping industry. It focuses on the Bill of Lading (BOL), the most critical document in logistics, which acts as a title to goods and a contract of carriage. By using Apple's native Vision engine, BolScan allows logistics coordinators to scan any BOL (from carriers like Maersk, MSC, or Evergreen) and instantly extract structured data without the need for manual entry or cloud-based processing.
A bill of lading is the one document a shipment cannot move without: receipt, contract of carriage and title to the goods, all at once. It is also, in most freight offices, still re-typed by hand. Every carrier formats theirs differently, so coordinators key the same forty-odd fields out of Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd and COSCO paperwork, one document at a time.
BolScan replaces that with a scan. It reads the document, finds the fields regardless of carrier layout, and returns structured data ready to export as CSV, JSON or PDF, in roughly eight seconds per document, more than forty fields per pass. Each value carries a colour-coded confidence score, so a coordinator can see at a glance which few entries deserve a second look instead of proof-reading the whole page.
Privacy shaped the architecture. Bills of lading carry commercial terms that shippers will not push through someone else’s cloud, so extraction runs entirely on-device through Apple’s Vision framework. No upload, no round trip, GDPR-compliant by construction, and as a side effect no per-page API cost and no dependency on a warehouse having decent connectivity.
Carrier-agnostic extraction
Ten-plus carrier layouts read without per-carrier templates, including the stamps, watermarks and diagonal overlays that defeat general-purpose OCR.
Processing that never leaves the device
Apple’s Vision engine runs locally, so documents stay on the machine that scanned them. It removes the cloud-upload objection rather than arguing with it.
Built for volume, not demos
Watch folders on macOS for unattended batches, camera capture on iOS, iCloud sync between them, and full-text search across thousands of past extractions.
BolScan ships as a one-time purchase across Mac and iOS rather than a per-page subscription, which fits how freight teams actually budget. Ten scans run without an account, so a coordinator can test it against their own carrier paperwork before paying anything.
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