Email triage for manufacturers and industrial SMEs
A manufacturing SME’s sales-admin inbox receives PDF orders, supplier confirmations, delivery-date requests and claims every day — and everything ends up retyped into the MRP by hand. The agent reads each message, extracts the data and flags whatever threatens a delivery date.
In your day-to-day
- 01
Extraction of client orders — PDF, Excel or email body — into the MRP: part numbers, quantities, requested date, no retyping.
- 02
Detection of supplier confirmations that push back a delivery date, with an alert to the buyer if a work order is at risk.
- 03
Routing of quality claims to the right team with the batch number and attachments already linked.
A typical scenario
A manufacturing SME’s sales-admin inbox takes 150 messages a day; two assistants retype some forty daily orders into the MRP between phone calls.
- 01
At 7:12 AM a fourteen-line PDF order lands: part numbers converted, prices checked against the current price list, an entry proposal ready to approve when sales admin sits down.
- 02
A discrepancy blocks one line — outdated price, superseded reference, minimum order quantity not met: it leaves the automatic flow and reaches the assistant annotated.
- 03
Lead-time questions get the date read from the schedule within the hour, no lookup, no retyping.
What changes
The assistants verify instead of copying, and a doubtful order never again enters the MRP untouched.
Order of magnitude
Working assumptions
- →around forty orders received per day
- →4 minutes of retyping and checking per order
On the order of 13 hours of data entry avoided per week (40 × 4 min × 5 days) — a third of a sales-admin position moved from the keyboard to the client.
Indicative estimate built on average sector assumptions — it gets recalibrated on your actual volumes during scoping.
What eats your days
- →
Supply shortages are discovered when the work order is released — and scheduling gets redone by hand in a rush.
- →
The sales-admin inbox mixes PDF orders, supplier confirmations, delivery-date requests and quality claims — everything is retyped, nothing is prioritised.
- →
Key accounts demand EDI, supplier portals and service-rate indicators — and it is your team copying data from one system to another.
How it works
- 1
Measure before sorting
We start by measuring the real flow: who writes, about what, what actually needs action. Sorting rules are built on that data — not on impressions.
- 2
Sort, extract, route
The agent classifies each message, extracts the useful data (references, amounts, deadlines) into your tools, and routes to the right person. Urgent items are flagged within minutes.
- 3
Answer the recurring
Acknowledgements, document requests, standard questions: the agent replies on its own within the approved fence. The rest lands pre-qualified in your team’s queue.
Typical results
95%
of messages classified and routed with no human involved
4 min
between an urgent message arriving and being flagged
0
client requests lost in the pile
Orders of magnitude observed in production; your diagnostic sets your own baseline and targets.
Frequently asked questions
Our orders arrive in every format, each client has their own — can the agent cope?+
Yes, that is its home ground: it extracts the data whatever the format, and flags any ambiguous or incomplete file to sales admin instead of guessing. A doubtful order never enters the MRP on its own.
Is entry into the MRP automatic or checked?+
At the start, the agent proposes and your sales admin validates — that is assisted mode. Autonomous entry, per price list or client family, only switches on once reliability is demonstrated on your real flow.
Is this the problem eating your team’s time?
Tell us how you work today — 30-minute call, then a free written diagnostic of what this agent would change for you, with numbers.
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