For UK distributors and wholesalers of 50 to 500 people
AI order entry for UK distributors and wholesalers
With AI order entry, the orders your customers email, attach as PDFs, photograph or text are read into lines in your own product codes, checked against their prices and your stock, and left as a draft order for one of your team to approve. Harrowell builds this for one order desk, connects it to the system you already use, and reports your order processing time and order errors every month.
Or send us one order and see the draft it would become.
The problem
Customers order the way they always have. Someone on your desk retypes every one.
At eight in the morning the inbox holds forty emails: a contractor’s PDF purchase order with their own part numbers, a photo of a handwritten sheet, two texts forwarded from a rep, and “same as last week but double the screws”. Each one is read, matched, checked and keyed by hand, by people who know which customer means which product.
A trade portal doesn’t end it. Of the 108 UK distributors and wholesalers whose websites we read, 73% offer online ordering, and 48% of those still tell customers to phone, email or give the order to a rep as well. Every order outside the portal costs keying time. The figures are in our research note on how UK suppliers take orders.
How it works
From the inbox to a draft order, step by step.
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1
Collected
Orders are picked up from the inbox customers already use, attachments included. Reps forward texts there too.
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2
Read
Each order is read into lines: product, quantity, unit, delivery day, PO number and notes. Handwriting and photos too, with anything unclear marked.
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3
Matched
The sender is matched to an account, their own codes to your product list, and “the usual” to their order history.
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4
Checked
Every line is checked against the customer’s agreed prices and your stock, and the PO against orders already entered.
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5
Drafted
A draft order waits in your system, or on a screen beside it, with each flag explained in plain words.
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6
Approved
Someone on your desk approves it with one click, or edits it first. Nothing is confirmed to a customer until they do.
An example
A contractor’s PDF purchase order to a plumbing and heating merchant.
Comes in
Morning, PO 55812 attached. 20 x CX15-E, 10 x CX22-T, 6 rolls PTFE. Wednesday to the Kingsway site please. Mark, site buyer
Checked
- Account matched from the sender’s email address
- PO 55812 has not been entered before
- CX15-E and CX22-T are his codes for your 15mm elbow and 22mm tee, bags of 10
- PDF price for the tees is £6.40 a bag; his agreed price is £5.95
- The Kingsway site isn’t on his account yet
Waits for your approval
Draft order · 3 lines · 2 flags
Price flagged, not changed. Add the Kingsway address, approve, and the confirmation to Mark goes with it.
Illustration with invented data.
What it connects to
Your inbox, your ERP and the records you already keep.
- Your email
- Microsoft 365 and Gmail both let an app you approve read a mailbox. We would ask for access to the orders mailbox only.
- Your ERP
- We connect through whatever your system accepts. Business Central’s API can create sales orders, as can SAP Business One’s Service Layer and Unleashed’s API. Sage 200 has an API that apps connect to once you give it access. More detail on Sage 200 order entry and Business Central order entry.
- If there is no way in
- The checked draft waits on a screen and your team keys it from there. The verdict says which it will be before you commit.
- What we need from you
- Your product list with codes and units, customer price lists or agreed prices, stock levels, and order history, a year of it if you have it.
- Who does the work
- We build and run it. Nothing is subcontracted, and your people approve every draft.
How a PDF purchase order maps to a sales order: getting email and PDF orders into your ERP.
What it costs you today
Keying orders, worked through for one desk.
Orders a day, times minutes per order, times the cost of an hour. Then the orders that go out wrong.
62.5 hours
a week of keying, at 150 orders a day and 5 minutes an order.
1.7 people
full-time, at 37.5 hours a week, doing nothing else.
£62,500
a year of desk time, at £20 an hour with on-costs over 250 working days.
£33,750
a year fixing the 2 orders in every 100 that go out wrong, at £45 each.
Illustration with invented data. Put your own figures into the order desk calculator. It works in your browser and doesn’t guess at savings.
What you get from us
From a thirty-minute call to a monthly report on your order desk.
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30 minutes
Call with you
How orders reach you, how many a day, and where they go.
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1 hour
Session with your desk
We watch real orders being keyed. The same day, a one-page verdict: the workflow, the KPI, today’s baseline and a fixed price. Or a written no.
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A fixed number of weeks
Build
Connected to your inbox and your ERP. Your team approves every draft from the first day.
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Every month
Run and report
We run it and report order processing time and order errors against the baseline. Stop at any report.
The whole order cycle, receipt to invoice: sales order processing automation.
Questions
What people ask about AI order entry.
- What is AI order entry?
- It is reading the orders customers send as emails, PDFs, photos or texts into lines in your own product codes, checking them against the customer’s prices and your stock, and leaving a draft order for a person to approve.
- Is it software we buy and install?
- Not from us. We build the system for your order desk, connect it to your inbox and ERP, run it, and report the numbers every month. Your team uses it to approve drafts.
- Will an order go through without anyone checking it?
- No. Every order waits as a draft until someone on your team approves it, and nothing is confirmed to a customer before that.
- What happens when an order can’t be read?
- It goes to your team as it arrived, marked with the reason, such as a smudged quantity. The monthly report counts how many orders needed a person.
- Do our customers have to change how they order?
- No. They keep emailing, attaching PDFs and texting as they do now. Your portal, if you have one, carries on as before.
- How long does it take to build?
- A fixed number of weeks, written on the one-page verdict with the price before you agree to anything. It depends mostly on your ERP.
Next step
Thirty minutes on your order desk.
Tell us how many orders a day you take and which system they go into. Or send us one order and get back the draft it would become. If we don’t find anything worth doing, we’ll tell you and leave.
The Open Build. We’ll build one UK supplier an order desk system, free and in public, measured on its own numbers. Everyone who applies gets a one-page read of their own workflow. Applications close at 5pm UK time on Friday 6 November. See the Open Build.