TIO VS Mainstack.co

TIO's answer

TIO largest customer handles 500 shipments a month

TIO's answer

Where TIO came from

TIO was built after spending time inside a freight forwarding operation and watching how the team actually spent their day.

The TMS was live. Email was live. And between the two, every shipment required someone to manually read each inbound message, decide which job it belonged to, and re-key the relevant fields into the TMS record. Pre-alerts, booking confirmations, ISF documents, port notices, trucker updates, carrier invoices — each one a separate thread, each one requiring manual work to close the loop.

A forwarder handling 150 shipments per month was spending roughly 20 to 30 hours per week on that loop. Not on quoting. Not on customer calls. Not on exception handling. On data entry.

The insight

The problem is not the TMS. The problem is the gap between the inbox and the TMS. Every piece of data that belongs in a TMS record arrives first as an email. Someone has to read it, route it, and enter it. That step is where the hours go.

TIO was built to sit in that gap: read every email, bind it to the right job, and pre-fill the TMS record for the operator to review and approve. The TMS stays. The filing path stays. The team stays in control. The data entry goes.

Where TIO is now

TIO is in active MVP development with a New York-based ocean freight forwarder, covering ocean import operations. The full workflow, from pre-booking through lot close, is being built and validated against real shipment volume.

TIO's answer

Who TIO is built for

TIO is designed for small to mid-size freight forwarders processing 50 to 500 shipments per month. The core user is an operations team managing job coordination through email and a TMS, across any combination of:

• Ocean import
• Ocean export
• Air import
• Air export
• Domestic trucking and drayage

The operations problem TIO solves

The typical forwarder runs 80 to 200 active jobs at any point. Every job produces a stream of inbound emails: pre-alerts from overseas agents, carrier booking confirmations, port availability notices, ISF documents, trucker confirmations, customs clearance updates, invoices. Each email requires a team member to read it, find the right job, and re-key data into the TMS.

At 8 to 12 minutes per shipment, that is 10 to 40 hours of ops time per week spent on data entry, not freight decisions.

TMS compatibility

TIO works alongside CargoWise, GoFreight, Magaya, Descartes, and any TMS with a REST or SOAP API. It does not require replacing or modifying the TMS.

Team size

TIO is well-suited for operations teams of 2 to 20 people. It does not require a dedicated IT team to deploy or maintain.

TIO's answer

TMS-agnostic by design

TIO connects to your existing TMS via API and does not require you to replace it. CargoWise, GoFreight, Magaya, Descartes, or any TMS with a REST or SOAP API — TIO works with what your team already uses. Setup takes under a week for most forwarders.

Full workflow coverage

TIO covers every stage of a shipment:

• Pre-booking — RFQ intake, rate extraction from carrier replies, booking draft pre-fill
• Execution — pre-alert extraction, ISF 10+2 field staging, lot creation queue
• Carriers — booking confirmation matching, vessel exception detection
• Trucking and drayage — LFD monitoring, dispatch drafting, POD receipt
• Customer service — natural-language job queries, exception notifications
• Billing — invoice-to-rate matching, discrepancy flagging, lot close

Most tools solve one lane or one document type. TIO handles the full coordination loop.

Human review on every write

Every TMS record is reviewed and approved by a named team member before TIO writes anything. There are no autonomous submissions. Your team stays in control of every job, every time.

No rip, no replace

Your filing path, your TMS, and your team's workflow stay exactly as they are. TIO adds the coordination layer that removes the manual data entry between your inbox and your TMS.

TIO's answer

The coordination gap nobody solves

Every freight forwarder runs the same operation: a TMS on one side, an email inbox on the other, and a team manually moving data between the two on every shipment. Pre-alerts, booking confirmations, port notices, ISF documents, carrier invoices — each one arrives as an email, and someone has to read it, find the job, and enter the data.

Most software either replaces the TMS entirely or adds another standalone system that creates a third place to manage data. Neither closes the gap.

TIO closes the gap.

What TIO actually does

TIO sits between your inbox and your TMS. It reads every inbound shipment email, identifies which job it belongs to, extracts the relevant fields, and pre-fills the TMS record for your team's review. One named team member approves the write. Nothing reaches the TMS without that approval.

The result: the data entry loop between email and TMS is handled. The team handles the decisions.

No replacement, no disruption

TIO connects to your existing TMS via API. CargoWise, GoFreight, Magaya, Descartes, or any TMS with a REST or SOAP API. Your filing path stays. Your TMS stays. Your team's workflow stays. TIO adds the coordination layer on top.

Setup takes under a week for most forwarders.

Human review on every write — by design

TIO does not write autonomously. Every TMS record pre-filled by TIO requires a named team member to review and approve before the write executes. This is not a setting or a toggle. It is how TIO works.

For filings — ISF 10+2, AMS, customs documents — TIO extracts and stages the fields for filer review. No filing path is automated. The filer reviews and submits.

Full workflow coverage

TIO covers every stage from first email to lot close:

• Pre-booking — RFQ parsing, carrier rate extraction, booking draft pre-fill
• Execution — pre-alert extraction, ISF 10+2 staging, lot creation queue
• Carriers — booking confirmation matching, vessel exception detection
• Trucking and drayage — LFD monitoring, dispatch drafting, POD binding
• Customer service — plain-English job queries across email and TMS combined
• Billing — invoice-to-rate matching, discrepancy flagging, lot close

Most tools address one of these stages. TIO handles the coordination loop across all of them, on every lane.

TIO's answer

• Large language models — email parsing, field extraction, and job-matching logic
• REST APIs — TMS integration adapters for CargoWise, GoFreight, Magaya, and Descartes
• IMAP / SMTP — inbox connection for reading and routing inbound shipment emails
• PostgreSQL — job state, email evidence, and extraction audit trail