BravoTran automation consists of three distinct steps:

  1. Identifying documents
  2. Grouping documents
  3. Assigning documents

These steps correspond to the key steps in the Progress Bar, as detailed here. Each of these steps is described in additional detail below.


1. Identifying documents

BravoTran uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read text on the page of an invoice. Based on the relative frequency of different terms and where they occur on the page, it makes a determination of the likeliest document type based on documents it has previously processed. This process is dynamic, and the system learns and refines its classification in real time, as more documents are processed. In some specific cases, document type learnings are shared across customer accounts, meaning that BravoTran improves for all customers as more documents are assigned.


2. Grouping documents

The Grouping step attempts to determine the number of distinct jobs represented by a set of documents. For instance, a single email may contain a single master bill, but multiple shipments' worth of house bills and commercial documents. This step uses the document types and their order, established in Step 1, to attempt to split the documents into these different document groups.


BravoTran has many different grouping strategies. The most common are:

  • Master-level documents followed by house-level documents, which are split at each new house-level doc.
  • Repeated document types, which are split with either every page becoming its own group, or using previously-established doc recognition patterns.


3. Assigning documents

Document groups are assigned to specific jobs based on a review of all available references on both the documents and the email message that the documents were received with. Unique identifiers like explicit job references, house bill numbers, master bill numbers, and in some cases container numbers are more likely to allow for a positive match and automated document assignment. Other references, like non-unique container numbers, vessel names, voyage numbers, weights, packs, etc. may result in an assignable document provided they uniquely identify a job.


Note that assignment at the consol vs. shipment level can be set by document type as an account setting.