Deal-Won / The work / Order entry
Your orders arrive as texts, voicemails and PDFs. Someone still types every one.
For regional food, beverage and produce distributors doing $5M to $50M with no IT department. We build the intake that reads the order, matches it to your catalog, and hands your team only the ones it is not sure about.
What this looks like at 6am
The first voicemail lands before the warehouse opens. A text that says “the usual, plus two cases of the new IPA.” An email with a PDF that is a photograph of a handwritten sheet. A standing order that changes three times a week and never in writing.
By nine somebody has retyped all of it. If they misread a case for an each, the truck carries the wrong pallet and you hear about it from the customer.
None of this is a technology problem. It is a nobody-owns-it problem, which is why it is still being done by hand at a company doing $12M.
What it costs you today
We do not publish an industry average for any of this, because we would be making it up and you would be right not to believe it. These are the four questions we actually ask on the first call.
- How many hours a week does your team spend turning messages into order records?
- What does one mis-keyed unit cost once the truck has already gone out?
- How often does an order miss cutoff because it sat in somebody’s voicemail?
- Which single person is the only one who can read a particular customer’s shorthand?
What we build
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One queue for every way an order arrives
Texts, voicemails, forwarded emails and attached PDFs land in a single place. Voicemail gets transcribed. The photographed order sheet gets read. Nothing depends on one person watching four inboxes.
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Matched against your catalog, not a generic dictionary
“The usual.” A customer’s private name for a SKU. A case-versus-each mixup. Resolution runs against your product list and your history with that specific account, which is the only place that knowledge exists.
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Anything uncertain stops and waits for a person
Every line carries a confidence score. Above the threshold you set, it moves. Below it, it goes to a review queue with the original message attached. Your team confirms in seconds rather than retyping from scratch.
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Written into the system you already run
The order lands in your ERP or order system. We do not replace it, and we are not going to suggest you rip out something that works.
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Watched after launch, by the person who built it
The first weeks are where the edge cases show up. You get the person who wrote it, not a support queue.
What this usually touches
- Your ERP or order system
- Voicemail and SMS
- Shared email inbox
- Product catalog
- Slack or Teams
- Accounting
What we can and cannot show you here
Proof matters more than promises on a page like this, so here is exactly where ours stops.
We have not deployed order entry at Mike’s. What we built there was the online store, the catalog, the invoice side, and an in-house AI operator the warehouse team messages in Slack to change stock, update prices and send invoices.
It is the closest evidence we have that a warehouse crew will genuinely use a system like this every day, which is the part that usually fails. Judge it as that, not as an order-entry case study. Read what we actually did.
The first call is where we find out what your order flow actually looks like, and whether this is even the job worth doing first. Sometimes it is not. The invoice side is often the faster win.
Questions owners actually ask
What happens when it reads an order wrong?
Every line gets a confidence score against your catalog and that customer’s history. Above the threshold you set, it moves. Below it, the order waits in a review queue with the original text or voicemail attached, so your team decides in seconds instead of retyping. Every action is logged and reversible.
Do my customers have to change how they order?
No. That is the whole point. Your customers keep texting, calling and emailing exactly as they do now. Asking a 30-year account to learn a portal is how these projects die.
Do I have to replace my ERP?
No. We write into the system you already run. Replacing a working ERP at a distributor your size is a year of pain for no margin, and nobody here is going to suggest it.
How long before something is live?
A first automation inside 30 days is typical for our engagements. It is an expectation drawn from the work, not a commitment, and your written plan sets the real timeline before you spend anything on a build.