479 hours of order admin, automated.
A family-owned industrial distributor in Ontario. 42 staff. 1,850 orders a month across email, phone, PDF and sales representatives. An ERP that worked perfectly for confirmed orders, and an invisible chain of manual work consuming the equivalent of 2.8 full-time employees every month before a single order was recorded.
Outcome
The client
The ERP was not the problem
The company had grown steadily through responsive service and long-standing customer relationships. Customers could email a purchase order, call an account representative, send a photograph of the part they needed, or walk up to the counter. The sales team would identify the product, confirm the customer's price, check stock and get the order moving.
That flexibility built the business. It also created an operation that depended on people remembering which customer received which price, which products could be substituted, which warehouse had stock, which orders needed approval and which spreadsheet contained the latest information. The ERP recorded confirmed orders. It did not control the work required to turn an incoming request into one.
Industry
Industrial wholesale and distribution
Location
Greater Toronto Area
Employees
42
Annual revenue
Approx. C$14.8M
Active customers
640
Products (SKUs)
Approx. 4,600
Monthly orders
Approx. 1,850
Warehouse locations
Two
The problem
Not an order-entry problem. An exception-management problem.
Approximately 72% of orders arrived through email, PDF purchase orders, telephone or direct messages to sales representatives. Every one had to be interpreted and entered manually. A typical order required an employee to identify the customer, resolve the product codes, check the contract price, verify inventory, confirm delivery and enter the transaction before sending confirmation.
When the purchase order contained a discontinued code, an ambiguous description or a price that did not match the agreement, the process stopped. The coordinator emailed the customer. The customer contacted the sales representative. The representative checked an old quotation. By then the same transaction might have passed through four people and three systems.
Operational symptoms
What it was costing
478.7 hours per month before a line of code was written
The diagnostic followed actual orders from receipt through invoicing, examining how coordinators, sales representatives, warehouse employees and finance staff each handled the same transaction. Six activity categories were measured across the operation.
| Activity | Before | After | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual order entry | 244.2 hrs | 62 hrs | 182.2 hrs |
| Pricing and stock verification | 87 hrs | 18 hrs | 69 hrs |
| Clarification and correction | 63.8 hrs | 22 hrs | 41.8 hrs |
| Customer status enquiries | 35 hrs | 10 hrs | 25 hrs |
| Invoice and credit-note rework | 22.7 hrs | 7 hrs | 15.7 hrs |
| Operations reporting | 26 hrs | 6 hrs | 20 hrs |
| Total | 478.7 hrs | 125 hrs | 353.7 hrs |
That was equivalent to the monthly working time of approximately 2.8 full-time employees. The cost was spread across coordinators, sales representatives, warehouse supervisors, finance staff and management, so it did not appear as a single obvious line.
The diagnosis
We mapped six connected workflows
Rather than interviewing management alone, the diagnostic followed the same transaction through every person who touched it: coordinator, sales representative, warehouse employee and finance staff. The central finding was that the business did not have a technology problem. It had a workflow problem that technology was making harder to see.
Order intake
How orders arrived across email, PDF purchase orders, telephone, sales representatives and counter requests, and how responsibility was assigned to each.
Product identification
How customer part numbers, old distributor codes, supplier codes and informal descriptions were matched to the correct internal SKU.
Pricing
How customer-specific contract prices, volume discounts, project quotations, promotional terms and supplier-cost changes were applied (or missed).
Inventory and fulfilment
How available stock, warehouse allocation, incoming purchase orders, substitutes and partial-shipment rules were confirmed before committing to a customer.
Exception management
How incomplete, incorrect or blocked orders were resolved: who owned each type, how long they waited, and what the downstream cost was.
Customer communication
How confirmations, back-order updates, shipment notifications and status requests were handled, and what proportion of communication was reactive rather than automatic.
What we built
A customer-order and operations control system
The system sat between incoming customer demand and the existing ERP. It did not replace the ERP. The ERP remained responsible for confirmed orders, inventory transactions, invoicing and accounting. The new system managed everything required to turn an incoming request into a clean, validated order ready for the ERP to record.
One order queue across every channel
Every incoming order, regardless of source, enters a single controlled queue with a unique reference, assigned coordinator, processing status and next action.
Purchase-order capture
Structured fields are extracted from emailed and uploaded purchase orders. Low-confidence fields are flagged for review. Nothing is silently converted to a confirmed order.
Customer-product mapping
A translation layer connects customer part numbers, old codes and supplier codes to the correct SKU. Once resolved, the relationship is saved for every future order.
Pricing-rules engine
All commercial rules in one controlled structure: by customer, product, quantity, contract, project and effective date. Price mismatches are classified and routed to the right person.
Inventory and substitution rules
The system checks available stock, warehouse allocation, incoming replenishment and approved substitutes. Coordinators see options immediately rather than starting another internal email chain.
Exception routing and operations dashboard
Each exception has an owner, a deadline and an escalation path. Management sees orders blocked, waiting and approaching cut-off in real time, not at end of week.
The redesigned workflow
Coordinators stopped entering every order as though it were unusual
- 1Purchase order arrives by email or phone
- 2Coordinator identifies customer account
- 3Product codes resolved manually
- 4Pricing spreadsheet or old quotation checked
- 5ERP stock reviewed
- 6Questions emailed to sales or warehouse
- 7Order waits in the inbox
- 8Employee follows up internally
- 9Order entered manually into ERP
- 10Confirmation emailed to customer
- 11Customer calls later asking for status
- 1Purchase order enters the controlled order queue
- 2Customer and order fields captured automatically
- 3Product codes matched via customer-product mapping
- 4Pricing and stock rules checked against live data
- 5Only exceptions assigned to specific employees
- 6Approved order submitted to ERP
- 7Customer receives same-day confirmation
- 8Order and shipment status remain visible without asking
The company's employees stopped processing every order as though every order were unusual. They focused on the orders that genuinely required judgement.
The outcome
78% faster. 354 hours released. 21% more volume without hiring.
354 hrs/mo
of administrative capacity returned across the team
C$182,000
in annual staff capacity at C$43/hr blended cost
21% growth
in monthly order volume absorbed without a new hire
Order corrections fell by 74%: from 74 per month requiring material rework to 19. Same-day order confirmations rose from 54% to 94%. Status enquiries from customers fell by 71%. Orders waiting more than 24 hours for confirmation fell by 87%.
Over the following six months, order volume grew from 1,850 to 2,240 per month. The company did not hire the additional coordinator it had expected to recruit. The existing team absorbed the higher volume because routine entry, pricing checks and status communication no longer consumed the same amount of time.
The order desk changed. Coordinators who had spent most of their day entering information shifted toward resolving unusual requirements, helping customers identify products, coordinating urgent fulfilment and improving customer records. The company retained the human service that differentiated it. It removed the repetitive work surrounding that service.
The bigger picture
Replace the ERP, or build the missing layer?
The ERP was not failing. It remained capable of recording clean orders, inventory movements, invoices and financial transactions. The weakness existed before information reached the ERP and after customers needed a status update.
Replacing the ERP would have created a longer implementation, greater migration risk, more staff training, higher cost, disruption to finance and warehouse operations, and no guarantee that incoming orders would become more structured.
Pressense built the missing layer around the existing system. That allowed the company to improve the workflow without rebuilding the entire technology stack.
Is your order desk acting as the integration between every system?
We map the workflow, quantify the cost, build the missing operational layer and measure whether it delivers the intended result.
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