Extract data from advance ship notices

An advance ship notice travels ahead of the goods. The supplier transmits it the moment a shipment leaves the dock, so the buyer warehouse knows what is coming, in what packaging, against which purchase order, before the truck arrives. In North American retail and automotive supply chains the ASN is the EDI 856 transaction; in Europe it is the EDIFACT DESADV message. Its whole value is the hierarchy: a shipment contains pallets, each pallet is a Serial Shipping Container Code labeled unit that holds cartons, and each carton holds items keyed to a product code and a purchase-order line. A receiving team at a distribution center scans one GS1-128 pallet label, and a correct ASN lets the whole nested structure receive against the PO in a single confirmation rather than a line-by-line count. The tree is what breaks, not the header. A flat extraction that lists items but loses which carton and which pallet they sat in defeats the point, because ASN-based receiving and cross-docking depend on the pallet-carton-item nesting. Retail-compliance programs charge a supplier back when the ASN quantity does not match what arrives, so the ship quantity per line has to be exact. One notice can reference several purchase orders, carry mixed SKUs on a single pallet, and split one PO line across two cartons. Ship date, estimated delivery, carrier, and tracking number sit in the header, while the SSCC, the carton count, and the per-item quantity live in the repeating detail loop that mirrors the EDI hierarchical levels. Point Talonic at the ASN, whether it arrives as a PDF render of an 856, a DESADV printout, or a supplier portal export, and it returns the shipment header plus the nested structure: pallets with their SSCC, the cartons on each pallet, and the items in each carton with their SKU, purchase-order line, and shipped quantity. Quantities roll up so the shipment total reconciles against the sum of the lines, the PO references stay per item, and an ASN dispatched 2026-04-20 against PO-2026-01102 loads into a warehouse management system ready to receive on scan.

What gets extracted from advance ship notices

How extraction works for advance ship notices

Advance ship notices originate in supplier ERP and EDI translators such as SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, and native SAP IDoc output, and reach a buyer as an 856, a DESADV, or a portal document, so the hierarchical levels are encoded differently each time. Talonic classifies the notice and maps it to the dispatch-advice model in the Field Registry, which preserves the shipment-pallet-carton-item tree rather than collapsing it to a flat list. SSCC codes are read from the GS1-128 labels, shipped quantities roll up from item to carton to pallet to shipment, and each item keeps its purchase-order line so ASN-based receiving can match against the order. Mixed-SKU pallets and split PO lines are kept intact. Every value returns with a confidence score and a pixel-region pointer conforming to DIN SPEC 91491, so a receiving supervisor can check a pallet SSCC or a ship quantity against the source before confirming the receipt.

Sample extraction

A retail advance ship notice with two SSCC pallets

{
  "document_number": "ASN-2026-04-8821",
  "document_date": "2026-04-20",
  "shipment_date": "2026-04-20",
  "expected_delivery_date": "2026-04-23",
  "shipper.name": "Redwood Consumer Goods Inc.",
  "consignee.name": "Northgate Distribution Center 7",
  "purchase_order_number": "PO-2026-01102",
  "carrier.name": "Old Dominion Freight Line",
  "tracking_number": "77451220",
  "total_quantity": 1440,
  "number_of_packages": 2,
  "pallets": [
    {
      "sscc": "00614141000000012",
      "cartons": 20,
      "items": [
        {
          "sku": "RCG-2210",
          "po_line": 1,
          "quantity": 480
        },
        {
          "sku": "RCG-2214",
          "po_line": 2,
          "quantity": 240
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "sscc": "00614141000000029",
      "cartons": 24,
      "items": [
        {
          "sku": "RCG-2210",
          "po_line": 1,
          "quantity": 720
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

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