Why manual order entry is so costly
Re-keying an order takes a few minutes: open the email, read the purchase order, find the customer, look up each reference, check the prices, then validate. Multiplied by dozens of orders a day, those minutes turn into hours.
For example, 40 orders a day at 6 minutes each add up to 4 hours of data entry daily — more than half a full-time role spent copying information that already exists.
Beyond the time involved, re-keying creates errors (wrong reference, transposed quantity, outdated price), delays shipments and ties your sales admin team up in low-value work instead of looking after customers.
Where customer orders come from today
In most B2B companies, orders arrive through very different channels:
- Email, with the order in the message body or as an attachment;
- PDF, generated by the customer’s software or scanned from a paper form;
- Excel or CSV, often with a template specific to each customer;
- Free text: “Please deliver 12 boxes of ref. A-203”;
- EDI, generally reserved for the largest accounts.
Every customer has their own habits, and it is rarely possible to impose a single format on them. That is why automation has to adapt to the orders, not the other way round.
Four approaches to processing orders
- Manual re-keying. Simple and requires no investment, but slow, costly and error-prone as soon as volumes grow.
- EDI. Highly reliable for key accounts, but heavy to set up and maintain: every customer has to agree to invest and adopt a standard.
- Template-based OCR. It reads fixed zones on a document. Effective on stable formats, but you need to create and maintain one template per customer, and the slightest layout change makes it fail.
- AI document understanding. It understands the content of an order as a person would, whatever the format or layout, and matches it against your ERP data. This is the Orkest Order approach, which it also applies to quotes and price requests.
Compare the approaches in detail →
How AI-powered automation works
A modern solution runs through the same steps your team performs today, but in a matter of seconds:
- Receipt: the order arrives in a dedicated mailbox or is uploaded manually;
- Reading: the document is analysed, whether it is a PDF, an Excel file or a simple email;
- Customer identification: the sender, name or account number is used to find the right customer record;
- Product matching: the customer’s descriptions are matched to your references;
- Checks: prices, quantities and terms are compared with your data, and discrepancies are flagged;
- Creation in the ERP: the order is created, ready to be picked and invoiced.
The key is exception handling: a good solution does not try to validate everything on its own. It automatically creates whatever is compliant and clearly shows you what deserves your attention.
Criteria for choosing a solution
- ERP compatibility: native connection, API or file import;
- Format coverage: email, scanned PDFs, Excel, free text;
- Exception handling: clear flagging and fast validation;
- Traceability: a link between the order created and the original document;
- Data protection: hosting, security and GDPR compliance;
- Setup and cost: time to go live, support and return on investment.
Orkest Order integrates with the leading ERPs on the market and can also work via API, webhook or export. See all integrations.
Implementing automation in four steps
- Gather examples: a selection of real orders that are representative of your customers;
- Configure and connect: ERP connection, catalogue and customer matching;
- Run in parallel: compare the orders created automatically with your usual data entry;
- Roll out gradually: start with your most regular customers, then expand.
Your customers see no difference: they keep sending their orders just as before.
In summary
Automating customer order entry frees up time, reduces errors and speeds up deliveries, without asking anything of your customers. The best way to judge a solution is still to test it on your own orders.