Plenty of trade customers will never use a portal. They email a PDF purchase order, and someone in your office types it into the ERP. This is one of the clearest, lowest-risk places to use AI today.
What the AI does
- Reads the PDF or spreadsheet attached to the email.
- Matches each line to your products and that customer’s pricing.
- Drafts the sales order and flags anything it isn’t sure about.
A four-week pilot
Week 1: collect a sample of real POs from your top customers. Week 2: run them through read-only and compare the drafts with what your team keyed. Week 3: tune product matching for the lines it got wrong. Week 4: let the team approve drafts instead of typing them.
Nothing reaches the ERP until a person approves it.
What to measure
Track how many lines are matched correctly first time and how long approval takes compared with keying. Those two numbers tell you whether to roll it out.
