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Solution Story · Order Automation

Matched once, remembered forever

Your customer calls a product "WHT-RF-30." You call it "104-2287-B." Someone at the branch has been translating between those two languages by hand, on every line of every order, for years. We taught the system to learn each translation exactly once.

The problem

Every order was a small translation project

Large customers order constantly — some place ten or more orders a day. Historically each order arrived as a PDF attached to an email. A branch associate opened it, read each line, figured out which internal product the customer meant, checked the unit of measure, and typed it into the ERP. Two to four minutes per line, multiplied across thousands of lines a week — and the knowledge of "what customer X means by Y" lived only in people's heads.

What the customer writes
WHT-RF-30 · "white roof panel" · EA
SDG-VNL-D4 · "D4 vinyl siding" · SQ
TRM-CRN-08 · "corner trim 8ft" · PC
What the ERP needs
104-2287-B · unit: EACH
231-0091-A · unit: SQUARE
577-1130-C · unit: PIECE

Every customer speaks its own product language — its own SKUs, descriptions, and units of measure. The translation itself was the bottleneck.

What we built

A cross-reference that learns

Per-customer parsers read the PDFs. A per-customer cross-reference database remembers every mapping — product and unit of measure — after a human confirms it exactly once.

Customer email PDF order attached 10+ orders/day for some Customer parser extracts lines, qty, their SKUs & UOMs Cross-reference per-customer mapping DB their SKU ⇄ our SKU their UOM ⇄ our UOM Order in ERP placed automatically seconds, not minutes unknown item? branch maps it once → remembered forever
The only human step left is teaching the system a mapping it hasn't seen — and each lesson is permanent.
Before
2–4 min
per order line — reading, looking up, retyping, double-checking
After
Seconds
per order — parsed, translated, and placed while the associate does something useful

Knowledge left people's heads

"What does this customer mean by that code?" used to be tribal knowledge that walked out the door with staff turnover. Now it's data — permanent, shared, and growing with every order.

Units of measure, too

The subtle killer in distribution: a customer orders in pieces, you sell in squares. The cross-reference maps units as well as products, eliminating a whole category of costly mistakes.

Adoption tells the story

17,000 orders in early 2023. 95,507 today — 5.6× growth, with 77 customers onboarded. Branches don't adopt tools that don't work.

Results

The translation tax, repealed

95,507
orders processed automatically
77
customers, each with a learned dictionary
5.6×
volume growth in three years
each mapping ever needs a human
They match it once. Then they never have to think about it again.
The whole idea, in one sentence