Getting your first BOL extraction workflow live in under two weeks

Pick the easiest format first

Resist the urge to start with your messiest, most inconsistent document type just because it's the biggest pain point. Starting with your single most common, cleanest BOL format gets a working extraction live fastest, builds team confidence, and gives you a solid baseline before tackling the harder formats where extraction accuracy naturally drops.

This sequencing also means the first two-week sprint has a realistic chance of shipping something usable, rather than getting bogged down trying to solve the hardest case first and never reaching a working version at all.

You don't need a TMS overhaul

A common misconception is that document extraction requires deep TMS integration or even a system replacement. In practice, most extraction workflows connect through data your TMS already exports, or through a lightweight integration that reads incoming documents and writes structured data back in, without touching the TMS's core functionality at all.

This matters enormously for operations running an older or custom-built TMS that can't easily support a full integration — the extraction layer can sit alongside it, feeding data in through whatever import method the system already accepts.

Build the review step first, not last

It's tempting to build the extraction logic first and bolt on a review process once it's working, but building the review screen first — even before extraction is fully tuned — means every early extraction, however rough, gets caught by a person before it reaches billing. That protects your operation from costly errors during the exact period when the extraction accuracy is still improving.

Once the review step is solid, it also gives you a natural, low-risk way to measure extraction accuracy over time: the correction rate on flagged documents becomes your clearest signal of whether the workflow is ready to expand to more document types.

Measure weekly, expand deliberately

Track manual entry hours saved on a weekly basis from the first week the workflow goes live, rather than waiting for a monthly rollup. This keeps the rollout honest and gives you an early warning if something isn't working as expected, in time to adjust before too much has been built on a shaky foundation.

Once the first format is running cleanly with a strong review-catch rate, expanding to your second and third most common formats tends to go faster, since the extraction and review infrastructure is already in place — only the format-specific tuning needs to be redone.