Traditionally, when customers place orders or request quotes, they use a purchasing system, accounting system, ERP, construction take-off system, or another business system. Once the order is placed or the request for a quote is sent, it will be automatically emailed to your sales team for them to hand-type the orders. While this process works, it quickly becomes inefficient for your business.
It is inefficient for a few reasons. To start, the amount of time it takes to manually enter orders from a variety of external systems can be incredibly costly. Further, in fragmented industries, sales and customer service employees have to learn what each customer’s specific product description means since they are rarely the same from company to company. Not only does this knowledge have to be learned on a one-off basis but it also can be lost with employee turnover.
Time and knowledge are only two pieces of this costly puzzle, though. Data entry errors are another. Human errors happen in business, and data entry is not immune to these errors. When you ask yourself questions like, “How much does it cost to fix an order?” and “How much does it cost to ship or deliver replacement items?”, you’ll begin to realize how costly manual data entry errors can be.
Overall, manual ordering processes can be archaic because they take valuable time for your employees to complete and they create the opportunity for entry errors.
However, there are ways to digitally automate business processes and programs. Many companies choose to not pursue automated flows, though, since it’s simply easier to continue to use legacy systems that require no extra cost.
At Kodaris, we are continuously focused on digitizing data and creating solutions that deliver value to our customers. We know order processing is an integral part of distribution companies which is why we offer a streamlined, automated ordering process that eliminates the need for manual intervention. We call it AI Order Automation, and our customers often refer to it as the Drag & Drop feature.
Years ago, we were on-site at one of our customers’ offices watching sales representatives manually enter orders from their customers. It looked incredibly time-consuming. We also noticed that each order contained products with names that were different from the next order. How did the sales team know all of the listed items even though they didn’t follow consistent naming conventions from customer to customer?
Our founder, having a background in the expense reporting and receipt scanning space, saw an opportunity to apply technology to create a process that was faster than legacy processes like this. And that’s exactly what we enabled for our customers.
Using patented technology that we developed in-house, your customers and employees can simply upload or “drag and drop” a purchase order form to the Kodaris Portal to enter an order.
The AI Order Automation feature can be critical to businesses of all sizes because it allows customers and employees to place orders quickly and results in zero entry mistakes, making it a seamless process for both you and your customers.
This Kodaris patented process delivers tremendous ROI by cutting the order processing time to nearly zero and eliminating costly mistakes and errors.
Our AI Order Automation feature is a simple, multi-step process for you and your customers.
Before diving in, it’s important to note that this capability is available in both the Kodaris Customer Portal and the Kodaris Employee Portal. Your team members will have full access to AI Order Automation. Your customers will also have access to this and can upload purchase order forms on their own without your team’s intervention. This way, no matter how you conduct business, this technology can accelerate your ordering process.
To start, your customer will create a purchase order form in whichever system they use (purchasing, accounting, ERP, construction take-off systems, etc.)
Your internal team or your customer will upload the file to Kodaris, which will read it in real time and translate all the information to a digital order.
Kodaris will match the products, add order data, and even add notes from the document.
If the product is not matched in our system, it will generate a generic name or code; however, as the owner of your account, you can train the system by setting a product code to match the customer’s description so that, moving forward, the system will always generate the proper product code for each item.
You will only have to assign an unmatched item to a product code one time. After that, the Kodaris system will automatically match the description to the specific code you previously set.
This capability is available per customer. For example, suppose one of your customers refers to your “Product 1A” as “XYZ” and another customer refers to it as “ABC”. In that case, the system will learn your customers’ naming conventions over time. This allows each of your customers to continue their internal business processes through the Kodaris portal, and it allows you to properly enter orders.
Kodaris is 100% relationship-driven. And we know that many of our distribution customers share that same value. With relationships being the foundation of your business, why not ensure all orders are entered correctly and give your team more time to focus on customer-facing tasks versus manual order entry?
See how AI Order Automation can help your business grow by experiencing the feature for yourself through this quick walk-through video:
