CASE STUDY · A2Z SHIP STORES
How A2Z Ship Stores processes 149,000 documents without a data-entry team.
A ship chandler in India runs its purchase orders, RFQs, and vessel deliveries through the inbox it already had — no ERP rollout, no new headcount.
The operation
A2Z Ship Stores is a ship chandler based in India, supplying provisions, stores, and spares to vessels calling at Indian ports. Like most chandlers, the business runs on relationships with agents, owners, and masters — and almost all of that runs through email, with a steady stream of WhatsApp messages mixed in. Vessels are served across a spread of Indian ports, each with its own agents and its own paperwork habits.
The problem
Purchase orders, RFQs, and quotes arrived as unstructured email — PDF attachments, inline text, scanned images, sometimes a WhatsApp forward of a photographed order sheet. None of it came in a fixed format. Every PO had to be opened, read, and manually keyed into a spreadsheet or ERP screen before anyone could act on it: which vessel, which port, which items, what delivery date. That work fell on whoever had time, which meant it competed with everything else the team needed to do.
What changed
BridgeMail now reads the same inbox, classifies incoming mail, and extracts line items, vessel names, ports, and delivery dates directly from attachments — without anyone re-typing them. Contacts get built automatically from the senders A2Z actually deals with, so the address book reflects who the business really works with, not a manually maintained list.
149,000
documents parsed
5,100
contacts auto-built
219
vessels tracked
“I run A2Z Ship Stores. I built BridgeMail because my own inbox was eating my margin.”
— Anwar Shariff
A2Z is BridgeMail’s founding company — this is our own operation, which is exactly why it’s the hardest test.
Frequently asked
Is A2Z a real customer?
Yes. A2Z Ship Stores is BridgeMail’s founding company — a working ship chandler in India that has run the product on its live inbox since the beginning.
Do these numbers include test data?
No. The 149,000 documents, 5,100 contacts, and 219 vessels are counts from A2Z’s production mailbox and database, not a demo environment or seeded test data.