The long tail of non-EDI orders
Your top accounts send EDI 850s, but the rest of the order book arrives as emailed PDFs, spreadsheets, and the occasional fax — and a CSR re-keys every one into the ERP, line by line, part number by part number.
Industry
Automate the Re-Keying Between the PO and the Proof of Delivery
A mid-sized distributor moves thousands of documents a week — EDI 850s from the big accounts, emailed PDF orders from everyone else, carrier freight bills, chargeback notices, rebate statements. b2bei builds automation that drafts the repetitive work and routes every result to one of your people for approval, running on your own servers inside the ERP and WMS you already use. Your team gets faster; nobody gets replaced.
The grind
Where the hours actually go
Chargebacks too small to fight
Retail customers deduct for shortages, late ASNs, and labeling violations, and disputing a claim means pulling the BOL, the signed POD, and the ASN timestamp for each one. Below a certain dollar amount most distributors just write them off — not because the deduction is valid, but because assembling the evidence costs more than the claim.
Freight bills that don't match the quote
Carrier invoices come back with re-weighs, reclassifications, and accessorials that were never on the rate confirmation. Auditing them line by line against your rate agreements is exactly the work that gets skipped when the AP desk is buried.
Rebate money left on the table
Vendor rebate programs pay on tiers, growth targets, and quarterly windows — tracked, at most distributors, in a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember. A missed accrual is invisible: the check simply never arrives.
The split
Automate the repetitive. Protect the cognitive.
We automate
Order intake from emailed POs — PDF and spreadsheet orders extracted into draft ERP sales orders a CSR reviews and releases
Chargeback dispute packets — BOL, POD, and ASN evidence assembled into a draft dispute your AR desk approves and files
Freight bill audit — carrier invoices matched line by line against your rate agreements, with every variance flagged for a person
Rebate accrual tracking — purchases tallied against vendor tiers and program windows, claims drafted before the deadline passes
Order-status replies — ERP and carrier tracking data drafted into a status response a CSR approves before it sends
We protect
Pricing and margin exceptions — whether to honor an off-contract price on a key account is a call your people make
Credit holds and releases — the system can surface the exposure; a human decides whose order ships
Buying and allocation — replenishment quantities, substitutions, and who gets stock in a shortage stay with your buyers
Carrier and vendor negotiations — audit data informs the conversation; the relationship stays human
How it runs
Prepare-and-confirm, always
AI drafts. A person reviews and approves. Nothing touches a live system without a human gate — that's the architecture, not a phase.
The full build architecture →A worked example
A customer emails a PDF purchase order with forty lines. The automation reads it, checks every part number against your item master, prices each line against that customer's contract, and stages a draft sales order in your ERP — flagging one superseded SKU and one line quoted below current contract price. Your CSR opens the draft, decides whether to honor the old price or call the buyer, corrects the SKU, and releases the order. The reading of the messy PDF is the only place AI language models are involved; the part matching and pricing checks are deterministic rules you can audit. What stayed manual is the part that needed the account relationship — which is exactly the part worth a person's time.
Questions operators ask
We already run EDI with our largest customers. What's left to automate?
EDI covers your structured orders — it's the long tail that eats CSR hours: emailed PDFs, spreadsheets, and the exceptions EDI itself creates, like 855 mismatches and ASN corrections. The automation drafts those into the same ERP workflow your team already uses, and a person approves every order before it releases.
Your live deployment is a manufacturer. Does that translate to a distributor's order volume?
It does — volume is what the architecture is built for. The system running live at our manufacturing and packaging client reads inbound documents, matches them deterministically against expected values, and routes every result to a person; a distributor simply feeds it more documents per day. Order intake, freight audit, and chargeback evidence are the same read-match-approve loop, and any new automation runs beside your manual keying until it is proven against your own accounts.
My CSRs are the relationship with our accounts. What happens to their role?
Every order still releases on a CSR's click, and if the system is ever down, your team can key an order from the emailed PDF the way they do today.
Map the repetitive work in your distribution & wholesale operation.
We sit with your team, map how the work actually happens, and draw the split: what's worth automating, and what automation should never touch. You keep the map either way.
Map your workflows