Email triage for wholesalers and B2B distributors
A distributor’s order-processing inbox mixes everything: orders, price requests, receiving disputes, supplier follow-ups, order confirmations. The agent sorts continuously, extracts references into the ERP and routes each message to the right team.
In your day-to-day
- 01
Detection of incoming orders and line entry into the ERP — references, quantities, net price — no retyping.
- 02
Receiving disputes (shortages, breakage) pre-qualified with references and photos, handed to order processing.
- 03
Supplier order confirmations matched against purchase orders, price or lead-time gaps flagged.
A typical scenario
The order-desk inbox of a technical wholesaler takes 250 messages a day for four clerks — orders, acknowledgements, disputes and supplier advertising all mixed together.
- 01
At 8:05 the queue is clean: sixty orders pre-keyed into the ERP, twelve price requests routed to the reps, the advertising archived.
- 02
A crookedly scanned order: the agent extracts what it can, marks the two unreadable lines, and the clerk completes it in thirty seconds instead of retyping everything.
- 03
A client replies “fine by me” to the twenty-second message of a thread: the approval is attached to the pending quote, which becomes an order.
What changes
Nobody “does the inbox” first thing anymore. Clerks start straight on the exceptions; retyping disappears from the job.
Order of magnitude
Working assumptions
- →some fifty orders a day to re-key, at 8 minutes each
- →150 messages to sort and route, at 30 seconds each
Close to 8 hours a day handed back to the order desk — order entry alone accounts for more than 6 of them.
Indicative estimate built on average sector assumptions — it gets recalibrated on your actual volumes during scoping.
What eats your days
- →
Orders arrive by email, WhatsApp and phone — and get retyped by hand into the ERP, with the errors that come with it.
- →
Client balances slip because collection comes after order processing, and the rep discovers the blocked account in front of the client.
- →
Supplier shortages and backorders surface at picking time — too late to offer an alternative.
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
Does the agent really key orders into our ERP?+
Yes, in assisted mode first: it prepares the complete order and order processing validates in one click. Once the observed error rate is zero on your standard flows, you decide to switch to autonomous entry.
What happens to an unreadable or ambiguous email?+
It goes to order processing with what the agent could extract and the blocking point identified. The agent never guesses a reference or a quantity — ambiguity is escalated, not interpreted.
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.
Get my free diagnosticFree resource
Get the self-assessment grid for your sector
Sales, admin, support, operations: the 20 tasks AI agents already handle in SMEs — with, for each one, the tell-tale sign that your team is concerned.