Industry
AI automation for wholesale and distribution businesses that still key purchase orders, quotes and price updates in by hand.
Sound familiar?
Distribution runs on documents. Purchase orders arrive as PDFs, Excel files and email bodies. Supplier price files come in their own formats. Customers ask for quotes by phone, email and web form, and the answer depends on contract pricing that lives in the ERP. A lot of skilled people spend their day moving data between those formats.
AI automation for wholesale and distribution is mainly about that movement. A document processing pipeline can read an incoming PO, match customer and item codes against your ERP, and create a draft sales order for someone to approve in a few seconds, flagging lines it could not match. The same approach works for supplier invoices, acknowledgements and price files.
We also build tools on the selling side. Customer-facing assistants answer stock and order-status questions from live ERP data. Quote requests can be pre-filled with the right customer pricing. Several of our own products come from this world: RFQ Pro handles request-a-quote and B2B quotations on WooCommerce, RepHub gives Shopify merchants a portal for sales reps with territories and commissions, and PDF Catalogue generates wholesale line sheets from your Shopify catalog. FeedGuard syncs supplier stock and price feeds into Shopify.
When your process does not fit an off-the-shelf app, we build the integration directly against NetSuite, Acumatica, Business Central or whatever runs your business, using the API integrations it offers. Human approval stays in the loop for orders and pricing until the numbers show it can step back.
The problem
A typical mid-sized distributor has an inside sales or customer service team that is busy all day, and a surprising share of that time is spent on data entry rather than selling.
For example, a distributor might get 60 purchase orders a day by email. Some are clean PDFs from a customer's ERP, some are scanned forms, some are a line in an email body: "same as last time but double the 4-inch fittings." Each one is opened, read and keyed into the ERP line by line. Errors in item codes or quantities turn into wrong shipments and credit notes a week later.
Stock checks, lead times, order status and proof-of-delivery requests come in all day. The answer is in the ERP or WMS, but customers can't see it, so a person looks it up and replies.
Customer-specific pricing, volume breaks and contract terms make quotes slow. A rep has to check the price list, the customer's agreement and current cost before replying, and the quote often lives in a Word document nobody can find later.
When suppliers change prices, every downstream list needs updating: ERP, web store, line sheets, rep spreadsheets. It is usually done by hand and usually incomplete.
Field reps keep notes in their own tools. Management finds out an account has gone quiet when the quarter's numbers come in.
Finance teams match remittances to invoices, chase overdue accounts and resolve short payments caused by pricing or delivery disputes. Much of that starts with an email someone has to read, find the invoice for and forward to the right person. It is a good candidate for the same document reading and routing used on the order side.
The fix is rarely a new ERP. It is reading documents reliably, connecting the systems you already have and putting a person in charge of approvals rather than typing.
Pricing exceptions, credit holds, key-account negotiations and supplier disputes should stay with experienced staff. Automation works best when it clears the routine volume so those people have time for the conversations that actually move margin. We also keep a human approval step on new order flows until the error rate on your real data is low enough that everyone is comfortable relaxing it.
Where we start
Incoming purchase orders are read from email, matched against your customer and item master, and created as draft orders in the ERP. Unmatched SKUs, odd quantities and price differences are highlighted for a person to fix before approval.
A chat or email assistant answers availability, lead-time and order-status questions from live ERP data, for customers or for your own inside sales team. It only shows each customer their own orders and pricing.
Quote requests from web forms, email or RFQ Pro are pre-filled with the right customer pricing and stock, so a rep reviews and sends instead of building from scratch.
Supplier price and availability files are parsed, compared against current costs and pushed to the ERP and web store after review. Margin changes above a threshold are flagged.
Accounts whose order frequency drops, or who stop buying a product line, are flagged to the assigned rep in the CRM or by email with a short summary of recent history.
Overdue invoices trigger polite, account-specific reminder emails drafted from your ERP data, with anything disputed or high-value routed to finance instead.
Integrations
NetSuite, Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, SAP Business One, Odoo and QuickBooks Enterprise, through their APIs or scheduled imports.
Cin7, Fishbowl, Extensiv and ShipHero for stock positions, allocations and shipment status.
Shopify B2B, WooCommerce and headless portals, including our own RepHub, RFQ Pro, PDF Catalogue and FeedGuard where they fit.
HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive for accounts, rep activity and quote follow-up.
EDI providers such as SPS Commerce and TrueCommerce alongside Outlook and Gmail inboxes, so EDI and non-EDI customers end up in the same order flow.
FAQ
On clean, digital PDFs it is usually very accurate; on scans, handwriting and free-text emails it is less so. That is why we create draft orders with confidence flags rather than posting directly. We measure accuracy on a sample of your real POs before go-live so you know what to expect.
Yes, if we have a cross-reference to work from. We use your existing customer item mappings, learn new ones as staff correct them, and flag anything unmatched. Building that cross-reference is often one of the most useful parts of the project.
No. Any customer-facing assistant authenticates the user and only queries data for their account. We test permission boundaries explicitly before launch.
Often. EDI usually covers your largest accounts, while smaller customers keep sending PDFs and emails. Automation brings that long tail into the same order flow without asking those customers to change anything.
No. Most mid-market ERPs have usable APIs or import tools. If yours is older or on-premise, we can work through scheduled file imports or a small connector, and we'll tell you up front if a limitation will get in the way.
Send us a handful of anonymized POs or quote requests and tell us which ERP you run. We'll show you what an automated flow would look like, how the documents map to your ERP fields and where a person still needs to check the work. From there we can estimate build time and monthly running cost.
Each solution is built from one or more of these. Follow a link for the detail on scope, stack and process.
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