Brief sections
The leak
Watch the person who “does the orders” for thirty minutes. The job posting said customer service; the actual job is moving information between systems — reading a document in one window and typing it into another, four systems deep, with a personal cheat sheet for the field names that don’t match. It takes time away from customer work, and each manual transfer creates another opportunity for an error. The person doing it usually knows exactly how absurd it is; nobody upstream has ever timed it.
What AI realistically does here
The extraction layer: it reads the document or message, pulls the structured data — customer, line items, quantities, prices, dates — validates it against what’s already in your systems, and pushes it where it belongs. Humans stop typing everything and start verifying exceptions: the unclear scan, the new customer, the quantity that’s ten times the usual order. Honest framing: the AI part (reading and extracting) is now the easy part. The real work is the plumbing — getting data into an ERP that predates the modern web — and that’s systems work, not magic.
What has to be true first
- Each system has a way in: an API, an import format, or at minimum a CSV upload someone tolerates. “The vendor charges extra for API access” is a real cost that belongs in the math before the build.
- A decision about which system is the source of truth for each field. If the ERP and the spreadsheet disagree today, automation will just disagree faster.
- An exception owner — the person who clears the can’t-read-this queue daily. Named, not “whoever’s free.”
What we'd install
Re-keying rarely gets fixed as one big integration project; it gets fixed workflow by workflow, highest-volume first. Each one is scored in the opportunity portfolio, the field mappings and exception rules go into the SOP library where the next person can actually read them, the extraction agent gets a named owner, and the value ledger tracks hours returned and error rate — with the before-numbers measured in week one, not remembered later. The cadence is the AI operating partnership.
Worth it?
Count the systems one order touches and the minutes each entry takes, then multiply by weekly volume — most owners have never done this multiplication and flinch at the result. The calculator below turns those hours and a loaded rate into an illustrative annual figure, labeled as such. Whether your systems can actually be reached is the readiness question, and it’s exactly what the scorecard scores.