On the operations desk, OCR is what turns a scanned bill of lading, commercial invoice, or packing list into characters a system can read rather than a flat image. It recognises the characters but does not understand or classify the document, so the output still needs checking and structuring before it drives a booking or a customs filing. This is the line between OCR and intelligent document processing (IDP): OCR converts text images to characters, while IDP layers AI and machine learning on top of OCR to classify the document type, extract structured fields, and validate the data. The forwarder decides how much of that broader layer a given document flow actually needs.
Glossary
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Optical character recognition (OCR) is technology that converts images or scans of typed, printed, or handwritten text into machine-readable characters.