The Touchless Order Target

Touchless rate is the one number that tells you how much of your order desk is still typing. Top performers clear 90%. Where are you?

The problem, in your words

You automated some order entry. Good. But "some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Half your orders still stop at a human keyboard, and you're not sure which half — or why. Without one number, "we're more automated now" is a feeling, not a fact. And the orders still being keyed by hand are exactly where the cost and the errors hide.

Why it persists

Most distributors track volume, not touch. You know how many orders shipped. You don't know how many reached the ERP without a person keying them. The exceptions — the orders that need a human — get averaged into the aggregate and disappear. What you can't separate, you can't shrink.

The teach — what touchless rate is

Touchless rate is the share of orders that flow from inbound document to ERP-ready with zero manual keystrokes.

It's the cleanest single measure of how much order-handling labor you've actually removed — not how much software you bought. A 90% touchless rate means nine in ten orders cost you almost nothing to process. The tenth gets a person's full attention, because it's the only one that needs it. That's the goal: spend your skilled labor on the orders that are genuinely hard, and nothing on the ones that aren't.

The play

1. Define "touchless" precisely. Document received → posted to ERP, zero keystrokes. Write the definition down so it doesn't quietly drift to flatter the number.
2. Measure today's rate. Even with no automation you have a number. It's just low. You need the starting line.
3. Segment the exceptions. Why does an order need a human? Bad item match, unknown customer, missing PO number, non-standard units. Each reason is a fixable category — not a fact of life.
4. Attack the top exception category. Usually it's item-master matching (see Play 06). Fix the cause and a whole slice of exceptions turns touchless at once.
5. Set a target and a threshold. Raise the system's confidence threshold as accuracy proves out. Chase the rate; review the exceptions.

How to measure it

• Touchless rate — % of orders posted with no keystroke.
• Exception rate by reason code — so you know what to fix, not just that there's friction.
• Cost per order on the touchless path vs. the exception path. The gap between those two numbers is the prize you're playing for.

The number it moves

Top performers run touchless rates of 90%+ (industry benchmark). Most distributors who haven't measured are far below that — and surprised by how far.

Every point of touchless rate is order-desk capacity you get back without hiring — capacity that goes to quoting, to service, to the accounts that grow. Werner Electric moved order accuracy from 96% to 100% on its automated path; accuracy and touchless rate climb together, because the orders a person doesn't touch are the orders a person can't fat-finger.

[PLACEHOLDER: MarginArc client touchless-rate trajectory — to be added]

Pick one number to run your order desk by. Make it touchless rate. Then watch which exceptions you're tolerating — and stop.

Every number here is either yours (the calculator, the audit) or an attributed benchmark. Talk to us about your number →