Manufacturing & Distribution

Automating the Customer Order Cycle, From Inbox to Dispatch, in SYSPRO for a Canadian Lighting Manufacturer

The Intelligent Digital Worker (IDW) Reads Customer Purchase Orders, Validates Pricing and Stock in SYSPRO, Applies Province-level Freight Rules, and Dispatches Orders Across Warehouses Autonomously

Client Overview

A Canadian‑owned manufacturer and distributor of commercial and industrial lighting products serving the electrical distribution market. In business since the 1960s, this company ships from many warehouses across North America through a national network of electrical distributors. Customer-service staff manually processed every incoming purchase order, validating customers, pricing, inventory, and shipping decisions before orders could be released for fulfillment in warehouses.

The Challenge

~15,800 POsProcessed each year manually

~50%Of orders required manual judgement

~110Unique PO formats

12+ DecisionsMade across three systems for every order

~20 MinutesSpent on each order, by staff

Manual Order Validation

Each purchase order required staff to read the email to identify the customer, validate SKU item or product code, match orders to the previous quotations, confirm pricing, and enter the order in SYSPRO. A mistake at any stage delayed fulfillment or resulted in incorrect shipment, while skilled customer-service staff spent much of their day on repetitive validation and data entry.

Complex Routing and Dispatch Rules

Shipping decisions relied on fifteen freight and warehouse routing rules that varied by province, customer type, order value, and regional exceptions. These rules largely existed as operational knowledge held by experienced staff knowledge and were difficult to scale.

Business Impact

Skilled customer-service staff spent much of their time validating orders, applying freight rules, and entering information into SYSPRO instead of supporting customers. Because many business rules existed as operational knowledge rather than documented processes, training new employees was time-consuming and scaling operations became increasingly difficult.

The IDW Solution

Intelligent automation across the entire workflow

1 Automated Order Intake and Validation

The IDW monitors the shared inbox, reads incoming emails and purchase-orders (PDF format), logs into SYSPRO identifies the correct customer account, validates standard pricing, quoted prices and inventory availability and product codes, creates the sale order automatically, and sends over acknowledgements. Exceptions are routed to customer service with full context.

2 Freight, Routing, and Dispatch

After validation, the IDW applies freight and routing rules, determines the correct warehouse, freight method and shipping pathway, generates dispatch reports from SYSPRO and allocates the order to the appropriate fulfillment warehouse. It archives supporting documents for a complete audit trail.

Visual Process Breakdown

Smart Validation Logic

Customer Identity Matching

Matches incoming orders to the correct customer account in SYSPRO

Stock Code Validation

Validates product codes against current and discontinued inventory.

Quote Correlation

Matches purchase orders to historical customer quotations.

Price Tolerance Checks

Validates pricing within approved tolerance levels and escalates exceptions for human review.

Freight and Provincial Rules

Applies customer, order value, and provincial freight rules automaticallyApplies freight and warehouse-routing rules based on province, customer type, order value, and regional exceptions.

Hold and Exception Detection

Detects missing approvals and hidden email instructions, routing exceptions to staff.

Systems & Integrations

Business Outcomes

65%Cycle reduction per order

~4,400Hours returned annually

~70%Orders processed end to end

100%Audit trail

Want to learn about more Intelligent Digital Worker applications across manufacturing and distribution operations?

Ideal for manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and industrial suppliers processing high volumes of customer purchase orders through ERP systems with complex pricing, inventory, freight and warehouse-routing rules.

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