Your customer orders are retyped by hand into your ERP

Between PDF attachments, customer portals and amendments by email, a sales admin team in an SME routinely spends 6 to 12 hours a week on this — and pays twice for every typo.

Thirty minutes, no commitment

Describe your flow. I'll tell you what can be automated and where I would start.

The order arrives by email. Someone opens the PDF, reads it, opens the ERP, creates the customer if it doesn't exist, looks up which of your part numbers matches the customer's part number, keys in the quantity, the price, the requested date, then starts again on the next line. Then sends an acknowledgement. This is not a competence problem or a motivation problem: it is a task nobody has ever had the time to remove.

That is the part I deal with. No overhaul of your information system, no ERP migration: I get orders into the tool you already own, without a human retyping what another human has already typed.

What it looks like in your shop

The part number on the order isn't yours

The customer orders against their own part number. Somewhere there is an Excel cross-reference sheet mapping theirs to your item codes, maintained by one person, extended by hand over the years. When that person is on holiday, order entry slows down. The problem isn't the typing: it's that cross-reference table living outside the ERP.

Every large customer has their own portal

One customer emails PDFs, another insists you fetch the order from their supplier portal, a third has been promising EDI for two years. So someone logs into three interfaces every morning, downloads, and retypes. The volume never justifies a real EDI project, but the accumulated time is entirely real.

The acknowledgement goes out the next day

The customer asks for a confirmed date. Since the order isn't in the ERP yet, nobody can look at the load, so the acknowledgement goes out with the customer's requested date rather than one you can hold — or it goes out a day late. Acknowledgement lead time is usually the first complaint raised in a supplier performance review.

The same order is keyed in twice

Once into the ERP for the paperwork, a second time into the workshop's planning spreadsheet, because the production module was never commissioned. The two diverge within days, and it is the spreadsheet the shop floor believes.

Amendments never reach the floor

« Pull line 2 forward by three days », « quantity goes from 40 to 55 »: these arrive as replies in an email thread, not as orders. They are handled by whoever reads the email, and sometimes only by them. The works order already released still carries the old quantity.

What it actually costs

Don't take my word for it — count. Three numbers are enough, and you have all three in the building.

Keying time: 3 to 6 minutes per order lineTake the number of lines keyed per week and multiply. An SME keying 120 lines a week sits between 6 and 12 hours — half an administrative post over a year.
Credit notes and rework: pull the figure for your last 12 monthsFilter your credit notes and returns on the reason « order error ». A wrong quantity, a wrong part number, a wrong delivery address: each one costs a transport run, a reschedule and an unpleasant phone call.
Acknowledgement lead time: from a few hours to 2 daysIt is a scored criterion in most supplier assessments. It costs nothing while things go well, and it costs you a listing the day a customer compares two equivalent suppliers.
Dependence on one person: one person knows the special casesThis cost appears in no cost accounting system. It appears in July and when someone is off sick.

The usual mistake is to reason purely in keying hours. The cost that hurts isn't there: it is the order keyed against the wrong part number, released to production, machined, and discovered at final inspection. By then you have paid for the material and the machine time, and you remake the part in a rush, pushing two other jobs back.

How it gets fixed

The approach is deliberately unremarkable. There is no miracle artificial intelligence in it — there is document reading, a clean cross-reference table, and a controlled write into your ERP.

1. We take your last 50 orders, exactly as they are
Not an idealised sample: the last 50, including the crooked scans and the customer who orders in the body of the email. That corpus decides what can be automated. Typically 3 to 5 customers account for 70 to 80% of your order lines: we start with them, not with the rare cases.
2. We get the cross-reference table out of the spreadsheet
Customer part numbers, purchase units, pack sizes, incoterms, multiple delivery addresses. That table becomes maintained data, visible, with a history, instead of a file one person opens. This is the real groundwork, and it is what makes the rest reliable.
3. The order enters the ERP through the front door
Through its API if it has one, through its import format if that is all there is. I don't use a robot that clicks through the interface: it is fragile, it breaks at the first update and it leaves no usable trace. If there is neither an API nor an import, I tell you before we start, not halfway through.
4. Nothing enters without approval, at first
Each extracted order lands in a queue with the recognised fields and a confidence level. Your sales admin approves in 20 to 30 seconds instead of keying for 5 minutes. After a few weeks, we let the cases that have never caused trouble through automatically and keep the queue for the rest. You set that threshold, not me.

In practice: three to four weeks between the first meeting and go-live on your two or three largest customers, then we widen the scope.

What this does not fix

What this does not fix — and I would rather you knew before paying me:

It does not replace your sales admin team. Whoever keys orders today will spend their time checking, handling exceptions and calling customers back. If your aim is to remove a headcount, say so now: on these volumes, that is generally not what happens.
Orders placed by telephone remain orders placed by telephone.
If your item master is dirty — duplicates, obsolete part numbers still active, inconsistent units — automation will simply produce wrong lines faster. In that case we clean up first, and that is a separate piece of work which I quote separately.
A poor-quality faxed scan stays a manual case. We identify it, we isolate it, and we don't pretend to have solved it.
It does not shorten your production lead times. It shortens the gap between an order arriving and the shop floor knowing it exists.

The questions I get asked

What does it cost?

The two-day audit is €1,500 and produces a costed plan. An order-entry project generally lands between €8,000 and €12,000 fixed price, depending on the number of formats and the state of your item master. The price is set before we start and does not move.

How long before it runs?

Three to four weeks to go live on your main customers. That isn't a sales figure: it is the real duration because the scope is deliberately narrow. A six-month project on this subject is a badly cut project.

Do we need to change ERP?

No, and if someone tells you otherwise for this particular problem, be careful. I work with the ERP you have. If your ERP really is the blocker — no API, no import, vendor unreachable — I tell you during the audit and you keep the report, whether you work with me afterwards or not.

What if you're no longer available?

You receive the code, the operating documentation and the credentials, and everything runs on your servers or on hosting in your name. Nothing is locked up at my end. It is a fair question to ask an independent: the answer is contractual, not verbal.

Who owns the code?

You do. The assignment is written into the quotation. I don't use a proprietary platform that would force you to pay a subscription to keep running what you paid for.

Where does our data go?

By default it does not leave your infrastructure. If a document-extraction component needs an external service, I flag it explicitly, with the vendor, the hosting location and the in-house alternative if one exists. You decide with the facts in front of you.

What if a customer changes their order format?

That is handled: the approval queue raises orders it no longer recognises instead of letting them through silently. You find out through an order waiting for attention, not through an unhappy customer three weeks later.

In your trade

This job is not equally urgent everywhere. These pages say where it sits in the running order, trade by trade.

Let's talk for thirty minutes

You describe your flow, I tell you what can be automated, what cannot, and where I would start. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so during the call.