Extract Packing List with What is OCR? Complete Guide to AI Document Extraction for Logistics

Details every package in a shipment. Essential for customs and freight reconciliation.

total_packages, gross_weight, net_weight, packages, hs_codes.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts printed or handwritten text from scanned documents, PDFs, and images into machine-readable digital data. In its simplest form, OCR identifies letters, numbers, and symbols in an image and translates them into encoded text that computers can process, search, and store. Modern OCR has evolved far beyond basic text recognition — today's AI-powered OCR engines use deep learning and neural networks to understand document layout, extract key fields, and even interpret contextual meaning.

For logistics companies dealing with mountains of paper documents like bills of lading, packing lists, and customs forms, OCR eliminates manual data entry and dramatically accelerates workflows. Rather than having staff type information from printed documents into ERP systems, OCR captures the data in seconds. Combined with intelligent document processing (IDP), OCR can classify document types automatically and route extracted data to the correct systems. To see how OCR applies to a key transport document, read our guide on [CMR document OCR](/tutorials/cmr-ocr).

From 0.002 EUR per Packing List page. [See pricing](/tutorials/comparisons/volume-pricing).

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