Sales order automation — AI frees your sales team from manual work
Your sales team spends hours entering orders and enquiries into your business software by hand, even though AI can do the same job in seconds. Lumav’s AI-based solution reads sales orders and price enquiries from emails (including attachments and audio), identifies the customer, the matching products, quantities, units and other essential details, and enters them into your business software automatically.
The result: fewer errors, faster service and more time for real selling.
Book a free mini-analysis and see how automation would work in your team.
Is your sales team entering orders by hand?
Companies selling to business customers have usually built a self-service platform to serve their customers, or connected those customers through automated data exchange (EDI).
But there is always a group of customers who prefer to order by email, or who simply request quotes from several suppliers every time.
In many B2B companies, that is why a salesperson’s day looks like this:
The manual order handling path
- The customer sends a sales order by email. Sometimes it is an Excel sheet, sometimes a PDF, sometimes free-form text.
- Someone on the sales team opens the email and the business software side by side.
- They select the customer in the business software and create a new one if needed.
- They start looking up products one by one, matching units and setting quantities. If a product is out of stock, they suggest an alternative.
- For more complex product selections, they involve a specialist to confirm the final choice.
- In the case of a quote, the price may also need to be clarified.
- Once the order or enquiry is agreed, they confirm the document and copy it into an email, adding an explanation where necessary.
Every order takes 15-60 minutes. When dozens of orders arrive each day, that adds up to hours. Manual entry also makes mistakes common: wrong or unsuitable products, something forgotten, a quantity keyed in incorrectly. Salespeople do not enjoy the work either — “grinding through order lines” is hardly motivating. Meanwhile the customer is waiting for an answer.
Typical problems when creating sales orders and quotes
Orders arrive in all kinds of formats
Excel, PDF, plain text in the email body, sometimes even an image. Each one has to be handled differently.
Choosing the right products is hard
The product range is large, the salesperson is not sure which products to pick and has to ask for advice.
Orders from different countries and departments arrive together
The customer sends their enquiry to the first email address they can find in the inbox. The order may be in another language or belong to another country’s team, and it needs to be routed quickly.
Manual data entry is error-prone
The wrong product code, the wrong quantity, the wrong price group. One digit off and the warehouse picks the wrong goods, which starts an awkward clean-up process with the customer.
The sales team does data entry instead of selling
Every hour spent copying data is an hour not spent building customer relationships.
Slow response times
If processing an order or quote drags on, the customer may go with a faster competitor.
These problems do not arise because the sales team cannot do its job. The problem is in the process: too much manual interpretation, retyping and repetitive decision-making that could be automated.
When order processing depends on a person juggling several systems at once, errors and delays are inevitable.
An AI solution that does the looking-up and data entry for you
Lumav’s team helps you dramatically cut the time spent entering incoming orders and quotes, turning an unstructured email into a finished document in your business software.
The solution is easy to integrate with your business software and can be extended with custom development (for example voice search, product recommendations, alternatives, showing additional information, routing to a sales agent and much more).
The AI reads incoming sales orders, understands their content and context, presents the data in a user-friendly view for approval, and then enters it into your business software automatically. Your team no longer has to copy, translate or type anything in by hand.
Every unstructured enquiry that arrives gets an accurate answer drawn from your business software, and only an order approved by a salesperson is sent onward. If something does not add up — a wrong product code, an unusual quantity, a missing customer — it can easily be corrected in the intermediate interface. The system learns customer by customer, including their slang. That way mistakes still get caught, but the routine work all but disappears.
What does the AI do in your sales process?
- Reads through the email, Excel file, PDF or other input.
- Identifies the customer and how they usually order.
- Matches the requested goods to the right products, quantities and units.
- Shows a person a reviewable view before confirmation.
- Sends the approved order or enquiry to the business software.
The results our clients see
Sales order automation multiplies the effectiveness of your employees. It means your best people work on the things where their experience and judgement matter — customer relationships, complex enquiries and growing the business.
Before automation
- 15-60 min to enter an order
- Data entry errors
- Customer-specific knowledge in one person’s head
- The sales team spends its time copying data
- Slow responses at peak times
- People are the bottleneck
After automation
- 3 min to approve an order
- Errors minimised
- Customer-specific knowledge in the AI knowledge base
- The sales team spends its time with customers
- The system processes orders immediately
- The system scales with the business
Book a free mini-analysis — we will show you how this works in your processes.
Why Lumav — 16+ years of e-commerce experience
Sales order automation requires three things: AI competence, an understanding of how different business software works, and knowledge of what can be automated in product data. Lumav has experience in all three dimensions.
For 16+ years we have built e-commerce solutions, integrated business software and automated business processes. We understand the bigger e-commerce picture and the cause-and-effect behind development decisions.
Alongside our services, we develop and implement new, innovative software products (including AI), which lets clients obtain a solution very cost-effectively that would cost a great deal to build from scratch.
Software that already works
The sales order and quote automation software is used by several very large as well as smaller companies, and it helps save hundreds of working hours every month. You are not a guinea pig.
The development is supported by the European Regional Development Fund with 52,894 euros. This is a systematic R&D investment that confirms it: this is a professional, validated solution, not a side project.
Works together with our other solutions
Part of our AI services
This solution is one part of Lumav’s AI services. If, alongside order automation, your company also needs product data synchronised between systems, take a look at our data synchronisation solution.
Business process automation
We also help with business process automation and e-commerce integrations more broadly.
E-commerce integrations
If data has to move between your online store, ERP, PIM, CRM or another business system, we can also help with e-commerce integrations. Everything from one place, from one partner.
Who is the solution for?
The solution is built above all for companies serving business customers, where sales orders or quote requests arrive by email and someone has to enter them into the system by hand.
Your company is a good fit if:
- Customers send orders by email (Excel, PDF, free-form text)
- Orders may arrive in different languages
- Products are configurable or hierarchical in some other way
- Different customers have their own ways of naming the same product
- Product selection may require expert advice or automation
Typical sectors and situations
- Orders come in frequently and there are many products to search through
- Processing each order requires retyping information by hand
- The sales team spends more time on data entry than on selling
- Product data is sufficiently enriched. If it is not, we can help with automated product data enrichment
Typical sectors: industry, wholesale, manufacturing, resale, building materials.
Frequently asked questions
What is sales order automation?
Sales order automation means that AI reads incoming orders (emails, Excel files, PDFs), extracts the data and enters it into your business software automatically. Nobody has to copy anything by hand any more: they get a user-friendly overview and can approve the order with a single click. Automation reduces errors, speeds up the process and frees up the sales team’s time.
How is AI able to read orders from emails?
The AI uses language processing and pattern recognition to understand the content of an order regardless of its format. That means it copes with a structured Excel sheet just as well as with a free-form email. The extracted data is then validated against the master data in your business software.
Is the solution compatible with our business software?
The solution can be integrated with any software that offers an API. Lumav has 16+ years of experience in connecting systems and has worked with many different platforms. We can integrate the solution with more than one system and build a separate, user-friendly view for making decisions. Get in touch and we will talk through how the solution fits your systems.
How much time does order automation save?
Our experience shows that automation frees up at least 70-80% of the time a sales team spends processing orders, and fully automatic setups are also possible, where a product match with a sufficient confidence level is sent to the business software automatically. If your team currently spends 4 hours a day entering orders, after automation it takes a few dozen minutes — mainly reviewing exceptions.
How do we get started with sales order automation?
The first step is a free mini-analysis. We listen to your business needs and map out how the system could work with your orders and processes. After that we map the integration requirements and launch the solution. Book a mini-analysis — we reply within 24 hours.
Didn’t find an answer to your question? Get in touch with us and we will reply to you personally.
Start with a consultation
Get in touch and we will talk through how sales order automation can free up your sales team.
Related services
In addition to sales order automation, Lumav also offers other AI and automation solutions:
