AI order entry for industrial distributors
When a purchase order arrives by email or PDF, the system reads it, matches it to your items and contract prices, and stages a draft order. Anything that doesn't match gets flagged. Your team checks the flags and approves instead of typing line by line. It goes live in about 30 days, and we measure the minutes per order before and after.
A customer emails a purchase order as a PDF. Instead of someone typing it into your ERP line by line, the system reads it and stages a draft order for your team to check.
Say your team gets 150 emailed orders a day and each one takes 6 minutes to key in. That's 15 hours of typing every day, about two full-time people.
purchasing@customer-co.com
PO 4471, please ship by Friday
Attached is our PO for this week. Same ship-to as last time.
PO-4471.pdf| Their part # | Your item | Qty | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| BRG-6204 | Ball bearing 6204-2RS | 40 | $4.18 |
| HB-38-1 | Hex bolt 3/8"-16 x 1" Gr 5 | 500 | $0.21 |
| VB-A42 | V-belt A42 | 12 | $9.65 |
PO price $8.90 differs from contract price $9.65. Flagged for your review.
Illustration with sample data.
Once order entry is working, the same approach fits other daily jobs your team does by hand with clear rules.
A daily list of the open quotes worth chasing, with the follow-up email already drafted for the rep.
Invoices checked against purchase orders and receipts, with only the mismatches sent to a person.
Margin by customer, rep and product, pulled from data your systems already hold and in front of you every morning.
Different industries, same job as order entry: take information people retype by hand, get it into the system correctly, and measure the result.
Laboratory systems · U.S. Air Force hospitals
I ran the laboratory information systems at both hospitals. Every result had to reach the right patient's record, so the systems had to check their own accuracy before anything moved. The order reader works the same way: anything that doesn't match stops for a person.
Enterprise AI program · my full-time role
When I took it over, 2 people a week were using it. The tool didn't know how the business worked, and the agents were wrong often enough that nobody trusted them. I fixed those causes first: taught the system the company's data, org structure and vocabulary, and rebuilt the most-used agents. Then I trained people one on one and built a champion network that meets weekly. I now build and run the company's production agents across sales, trust and safety, and customer success.
Operations platform · owner-run brokerage
The brokerage ran hundreds of open deals on spreadsheets, email threads and manual status tracking, and deals got lost. I designed and built one system for all of it: listing intake, state-by-state compliance tracking, task assignment, payments and e-signatures, and revenue reporting.
Research and outreach pipeline · 12 B2B clients
Through my own agency, I built a pipeline on each client's own systems that researched every prospect and drafted a personal first line, subject and email. It connected to their CRM and data tools, and I ran the email infrastructure behind it.
About 30 days from sample orders to live, measured before and after, so the decision about what comes next is based on your own numbers.
Forward a week of real POs with the customer details blacked out. I build around the formats your customers actually send.
Before I build anything, we measure the minutes per order and how often mistakes slip through.
The system does the work and stages it. Your team checks and approves every item while we tune it.
Same measurement, new system. If the savings are worth it, I stay on to run it and we pick the next job.
Nothing goes to a customer or into your books without a person signing off until you decide it should.
If the numbers hold up, I stay on to run the system and adjust it as your customers' orders change. Once order entry runs smoothly, we pick the next job together. I work with a small number of companies for the long term.
I'm Dan Wilson. Building AI agents is my full-time work. I run the AI program for a large company's sales organization: I build the agents, teach people to use them, and show leadership what they return. Before that, I ran my own automation practice for two years.
I spent 14 years as a U.S. Air Force officer, leading laboratory operations across four bases with teams of up to 90 people. I also ran the lab systems at two of the Air Force's largest hospitals, moving more than 742,000 test results a year into the patient record. That's where I learned to build systems that check their own accuracy.
I'm also a small business owner. I've invested in real estate for more than 12 years and manage about two dozen rentals myself, with an AI system I built handling a lot of the office work. I know what it's like when every hour of paperwork comes out of your own week.
Most distribution ERPs, Prophet 21 included, take orders in through an API or a scheduled file import. The approved draft goes in that way and becomes a real order in your system. We confirm which route yours supports on the first call, and if it needs an add-on license, you'll know before the pilot starts.
Orders are read by commercial AI models, sent only to providers whose business terms don't allow training on your data. The system runs on its own server for your company, so your orders never sit alongside anyone else's.
Anything it can't match gets flagged: a price that differs from the contract, a unit that doesn't fit, a part number it doesn't know, a missing ship date. A person approves every order, and nothing enters your system without that approval until you decide otherwise.
No. They keep sending POs the way they do now, and they still talk to the same people on your team. Your CSRs just stop typing.
EDI needs each customer to set up a connection on their end. This reads the emails and PDFs your customers already send, so nobody on their side does anything.
Reading and checking the orders doesn't depend on your ERP. Only the last step, sending the approved order in, does, and that gets pointed at the new system when you switch.
Tell me roughly how many come in by email or PDF and which ERP you use. I'll tell you whether it's a fit and what a pilot would look like. Every message comes straight to me, and I answer them myself.
Prefer email? dan@bedrockprocess.com
