B2B distribution
Distributors, wholesalers, and manufacturer-reps running a B2B order desk know where the day goes. Roughly a third of orders arrive outside EDI, as emailed PDFs, faxed sheets, and portal screenshots, then a CSR keys each line into the ERP and checks the price against a contract in another tab. We build the extraction and posting pipeline against the formats your customers actually send, with contract pricing verified on the way through and the ERP as the system of record.
Where the order desk sharpens up
These are the patterns we see in discovery across distributors and wholesalers. If two of the four are recognisable, the pipeline pays for itself inside a quarter.
Roughly a third of orders never touch EDI. They come in as emailed PDFs from a buyer, faxed rewrites of an internal requisition, or screenshots pulled from a customer portal. Operations leaders want intake classified by customer on arrival, with line items, part numbers, and quantities extracted against the formats the top twenty accounts actually send.
We build: classification-first intake trained on your customers' PO layouts, with line extraction that tolerates faxed and screenshot quality.
Every account sits on a different contract: tier pricing, volume breaks, rebates, promotional windows. CSRs keep a second tab open to confirm the unit price on each line, and a mispriced order lands as a credit memo two weeks later. Finance leads want each line checked against the customer price list and any mismatch held for review before the order posts.
We build: line-level pricing checks against the customer-specific price list, with mismatches flagged before the order posts to the ERP.
Large accounts receive deliveries at dozens of locations, and the PO carries a free-text address that rarely matches the ship-to record letter for letter. Order desks want fuzzy matching against the customer ship-to master, with a suggested ID surfaced on the order line and a flag raised when the address has no match in the file.
We build: ship-to resolution against the customer master, with fuzzy matching, suggested IDs, and flags for addresses that are not on file.
A clean PO can still be a bad order if the account is over its credit limit or on a hold flag from finance. Credit managers want every order checked against the customer record on arrival, orders over limit routed to a named reviewer, and held accounts stopped before they reach the picking floor.
We build: credit limit and account hold checks against the customer record, with over-limit orders routed to finance and held accounts stopped at intake.
Order desk inbox, fax-to-email gateway, customer portal downloads, EDI 850 feeds. All route into one queue per customer ID.
Each document tagged to customer, order type, and whether it is a new PO, a change order, or a confirmation before extraction runs.
Structured parse for clean PDFs, OCR-first for faxed and screenshot quality, with part number, quantity, unit of measure, and ship-to on every line.
Lines priced against the contract, ship-to resolved to the customer master, order checked against credit limit and hold flags.
Clean orders posted into the ERP with source documents attached. Exceptions named by customer, line, and reason code.
The customer PO carries a part number and a unit price, the contract price list carries the agreed price for that account and tier, and the ERP item master carries the catalogue price. The pipeline reads all three, ties each PO line to its contract entry, and holds the order when a line price does not match the contract. CSRs see one flagged line, not three screens.
Case studies in this industry
Each case links to a named client, a named document, and the system of record the data lands in. We publish only what the client signed off to publish.
Non-EDI POs extracted against the contract price list, 93% accuracy on 2,800 POs/month on Prophet 21.
→Distribution · 2026HVAC distributor · emailed POs into Prophet 21Emailed POs posted to Prophet 21 the day they arrive.
→Distribution · 2024Plumbing distributor · faxed PDF intakeFaxed PDFs extracted to order lines, 91% ship-to auto-match.
→Distribution · 2026Industrial distributor · fax-to-ERP on Infor SX.eInfor SX.e fax-to-ERP for a multi-entity operation.
→Distribution · 2024Industrial wholesaler · contract pricing verificationContract pricing verified before the order posts.
→Distribution · 2024Food service distributor · contract pricing on ordersContract pricing verified on orders before they post.
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