AI Automation · Wholesale distribution
Automate the paperwork without losing the exceptions.
Reduce purchase order rekeying while directing pricing, product and account discrepancies to the right people.
Discuss a similar challenge01 / The challenge
Where the work began.
A wholesale distributor received purchase orders as PDFs, spreadsheets and email attachments. Employees rekeyed order lines into the ERP, then investigated item numbers specific to each customer, incompatible units of measure, missing delivery details and differences between quoted and submitted prices.
Reading the document was only part of the task. The order also had to make sense against the distributor's customer, product and pricing records.
02 / The approach
What we did.
RFA's automation engineer and operations analyst worked with order management to define which orders were eligible for processing. They structured extraction around the customer account, purchase order number, delivery address, item reference, quantity, unit of measure, requested date and submitted price. Scanned documents passed through optical character recognition where required.
The team validated extracted data against customer master records, product mappings, pack sizes and applicable pricing rules. They kept conversions explicit: a quantity expressed in cases was not treated as individual units without an approved conversion.
Missing mappings and price discrepancies went to an exception queue with the relevant source text attached. Orders meeting the client's approved criteria proceeded only to the agreed ERP stage.
RFA linked the original document, validation decisions and submission response. Duplicate keys and retry controls addressed repeated processing and duplicate order creation, keeping those controls within the ERP handoff.
03 / The scope
What the work covered.
- Purchase order field extraction
- Business rule validation and exception queue
- Controlled ERP handoff and traceability
- Order processing evaluation plan
04 / The outcome
What the work established
The work established a purchase order processing workflow spanning document extraction, validation against business records, exception review and a controlled ERP handoff. Source documents and processing decisions remained connected for inspection.
The measurement plan covered order entry time, manual review rate, validation at the first attempt and corrections after entry. It paired any reported automation rate with the share of orders still needing human review.
Reading the purchase order was only the start. We still had to check the customer's old product code, the price that did not match, or the same attachment sent twice. The validation rules put those checks into the workflow.