Cut Your Order-Entry Cost
The problem, in your words
"You're paying skilled people to type. Every day. On repeat."
Customers don't send clean POs. They say "send the usual." They attach a PDF. They forward an email chain. They fax a smudged sheet. Someone on your desk reads it, finds the account, matches the part numbers, keys the order, checks it, fixes it. Then the next one lands. Margins in distribution are thin. The labor doing this is not.
Why it persists
Orders arrive in every format. EDI solved it for your biggest customers years ago. The long tail still comes as email, PDF, and fax — and that long tail is most of your accounts. Your ERP assumes clean, structured input; it was never built to read a paragraph that says "same as last month, swap the 3/4-inch for 1-inch."
So a person becomes the translation layer. And you can't hire your way out of it: order entry is an aging, hard-to-backfill role. The work piles onto inside sales, who then quote less because they're typing more. The cost is real, recurring, and almost never measured.
The play
- Measure your channel mix. Pull one week of inbound orders. Count the share arriving as EDI versus email, PDF, fax, and phone. The unstructured share is your target — and usually it's bigger than anyone guesses.
- Time the manual path. Have three reps log minutes-per-order for two days. Capture the whole path: read, look up the account, match items, key, review, correct.
- Start with one lane. One customer segment or one channel — the messiest, highest-volume one. Not all of it at once. Pilots die in the edge cases when you try to boil the ocean.
- Resell a proven engine. Conexiom, Esker, or a custom document reader where your documents are too messy for an off-the-shelf tool. Don't build a parser from scratch — map a proven one to your item and customer master.
- Set a confidence threshold. Orders the system is sure about flow straight to the ERP. The rest route to a person. You're removing the typing, not the judgment.
- Instrument before and after from day one, same definition both sides.
How to measure it
Four numbers, baselined before you flip anything on:
- Cost per order — fully-loaded labor ÷ orders processed.
- Minutes per order — request to ERP-ready.
- Touchless rate — share of orders that reach the ERP with no human keystroke.
- Error / correction rate — exceptions caught and fixed.
If you don't have a "before," you can't prove an "after." Two weeks of real data is enough.
The number it moves
Manual order entry runs roughly $8–15 per order (Mirage Metrics, 2026: "the $8 figure is a floor, not an average"). Automation cuts processing time up to ~80% and lets you handle far more volume without adding headcount (Conexiom / Proton).
The proof points are public. Graybar processed 83,000 documents with 9.5 million line items through Conexiom in the first half of 2021 — at 100% accuracy. Werner Electric moved order accuracy from 96% to 100% on the automated path. Sonepar reported saving roughly 1,000 hours a month.
Live in about 30 days. Zero changes to your ERP — the engine adapts to your system, not the other way around.
[PLACEHOLDER: MarginArc client before/after — to be added]
The point isn't the technology. It's the line item you've been paying, every day, on repeat — and the fact that you can finally put a number on it.