The Future of Sales Order Automation: Getting Orders Right from the Start

Today marks a critical inflection point in our industry with the launch of the Conexiom Ideal Order Platform. It’s a giant step forward in sales order automation. I’m incredibly proud of our team and customer design partners to reach this milestone. And we’re just getting started. You can see the new standard for sales order automation in action here.

I’ve spent years in the trenches with manufacturers and distributors, and one thing is clear—B2B sales is incredibly complex and high stakes. Getting sales orders right and getting them right early, before you accept them and commit to those terms with your customers and your fulfillment teams. That is the key to setting yourself up for either sustained success or endless firefighting through a set of “least bad choices” down the line.

Sales order processing should be simple. Orders come in, they get processed accurately, and shipments go out on time. But we all know that’s not the reality. Instead, manufacturers and distributors are constantly dealing with large volumes of manual orders to process, pricing mismatches, incorrect part numbers, fulfillment delays, and a rising cost-to-serve.

And here’s the real problem—most so-called "automation" tools don’t actually fix this. They just take the same manual process and partially reduce the data entry labor burden, without addressing the root issues. That’s not solving the problem. That’s just making mistakes happen faster.

At Conexiom, we believe sales order automation has to do more.

Time to Raise the Bar

The way we see it, every order should be accurate and optimized for on-time-in-full (OTIF) fulfillment and profitability before it ever reaches the fulfillment team. That’s why we built the Conexiom Ideal Order Platform—not just to automate order entry, but to ensure orders are correct, profitable, and in the best position for OTIF success from the start.

We use AI at the point of order acceptance to catch order issues before they cause delays, errors, disputes, or margin loss. The result? Fewer costly interventions, better OTIF performance, and the ability to serve every customer segment—without asking them to change how they buy from you.

We know this works because we’ve seen the data. Our AI has processed over one billion PO lines and is trusted by 16 of the top 20 industrial distributors. This isn’t about just reducing order process labor (although that’s still very important)—it’s about validating, correcting, and optimizing every order so fulfillment runs smoothly and profitably.

So what does this mean for your business?

• Orders go through correctly the first time, so your team isn’t stuck fixing errors.
• Margins go up and your cost-to-serve goes down because you’re recommending the right products while eliminating inefficiencies and unnecessary rework.
• Your OTIF rates improve, keeping customers happy and reducing churn.
• Root causes of systemic issues that impact accuracy, OTIF, and margins are uncovered by AI with actions to take per customer, product line, or team.
• And most importantly—your team can focus on growth instead of firefighting bad orders.

This isn’t about making small, incremental improvements. It’s about rethinking how sales orders are processed so that businesses can scale faster, reduce operational waste, and drive better customer experiences.

The industry is changing. The companies that embrace AI and Automation to improve both customer satisfaction and profitability—not just faster data entry—are the ones that will come out ahead.

Are you ready to be one of them?

Serving All Customers Well with Right Sales Order Automation

Manufacturers and distributors are under more pressure than ever. Customers expect faster, more accurate service, supply chains are more complex, and margins are razor-thin. At the same time, businesses have invested in automation tools that should, in theory, make order processing seamless. Yet, despite all the technology available, errors are still slipping through.

Every executive conversation I have with our customers leads to the challenge of finding the best way to serve their diverse customer segments well.  Their customers span geographies, sizes, buying patterns, and preferred order channel.

On paper, moving all order volume to digital order channels like EDI or B2B ecommerce might seem like the obvious fix. While those approaches have benefits, neither is a silver bullet—even if you could solve the buyer adoption problems that lead to a massive digital order gap.

The reason? Most automation tools focus on data entry efficiency, not true order automation. They might reduce manual keystrokes, but they still require human review and correction before an order can move forward.

If the data is wrong, these systems don’t fix the issue—they just pass errors along faster, creating bottlenecks in fulfillment and increasing costs. That’s not real automation—it’s just shifting the manual workload downstream instead of eliminating it.

Companies have long relied on solutions like EDI, OCR, and RPA, believing they would solve the problem. But in reality, these tools only digitize and speed up processes—they don’t correct mistakes.

• EDI can be appropriate for “tier 1 customers” but comes with adoption challenges: While EDI can streamline transactions between businesses, it requires customers to adopt and maintain structured data formats, which isn’t always feasible—especially for smaller buyers. As a result, adoption is often limited, leaving a significant portion of orders to be handled manually or through less efficient methods.
• B2B ecommerce can serve “long tail, ad-hoc customers” but comes with other adoption challenges: Although B2B ecommerce portals can ensure buyers are ordering from your current catalog with the right part numbers and prices, adoption is often staggeringly low.  Compared to hitting “send” of a PO from their ERP to email your customer service rep (CSR), ecommerce requires your customers to do double data entry—on their system then on yours—plus the added burden of manually mapping their part numbers, units of measure, etc. into your catalog.  No wonder only truly unplanned orders are popular for B2B ecommerce today.

To solve for this massive digital order gap between EDI and B2B ecommerce, companies have often sought general workflow automation tools.  Spoiler alert—it has not paid off.

The Problem with Traditional Sales Order Automation

For years, automation to fill in the digital order gap between EDI and B2B ecommerce has been about reducing manual entry—turning PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets into structured data that can be fed into an ERP. But automation alone isn’t enough. Just because an order is processed quickly doesn’t mean it’s correct.

Picture a factory floor: If a machine stamps out defective parts faster, you don’t have a production advantage—you have a warehouse full of unusable inventory. That’s exactly what’s happening with sales orders. A wrong part number still must be fixed. An incorrect price still cuts into your margins. A missing shipping detail still leads to delays.

Companies have long relied on solutions like OCR, and RPA, believing they would solve the problem. In reality, these tools only digitize and speed up processes—they don’t correct mistakes.

• OCR extracts but doesn’t verify: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is OK at pulling text from documents, albeit with data extraction quality challenges, but fails to cross-check it against existing data, leaving room for errors.
• RPA and IDP moves bad data faster: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) automates workflows but doesn’t analyze the accuracy of the information being processed, leading to fast-tracked mistakes.

As a result, companies spend millions in unnecessary costs correcting mistakes, issuing credits, and handling frustrated customers who receive incorrect shipments.

This is why many manufacturers and distributors still rely on teams of CSRs manually reviewing and fixing orders before they can move forward. The process is inefficient, expensive, and introduces even more human error. At scale, this approach simply isn’t sustainable.

The High Cost of Order Errors

Order errors don’t just slow down operations—they damage customer relationships, increase costs, and threaten profitability. A recent study found that businesses lose an average of $18,000 per order error when factoring in rework, lost productivity, and customer churn.

For example, a global industrial supplier recently discovered that nearly 30% of its returned shipments were due to “dirty” order data making its way from inbound purchase orders (POs) into their ERP—either wrong SKUs, missing quantities, or pricing mismatches. These errors led to delays in customer deliveries, excessive freight costs, and reputational damage. Worse yet, their competitors took advantage of their reliability issues to steal market share.

And it’s not just an inconvenient “do over”—it’s a business risk. Incorrect orders can cause production stoppages, lost contracts, and compliance issues in regulated industries.

• Operational slowdowns: Even a small part number discrepancy can create delays, leading to additional manual work, fulfillment issues, and increased costs.
• Compliance risks: In industries like healthcare and those with government contracts, order errors can result in regulatory violations, leading to fines and legal consequences.
• Customer dissatisfaction: Frequent errors can erode trust with customers, trigger lengthy invoice disputes, and leading them to take their business elsewhere.
• Unnecessary labor costs: Companies end up paying employees to fix preventable mistakes, rather than focusing on higher-value activities that drive growth.

Now there’s a better way.

Conexiom Ideal Order Platform: A Smarter Approach

Manufacturers and distributors know that sales order processing should drive growth, not slow it down. But too often, businesses are stuck dealing with inefficiencies—pricing mismatches, incorrect part numbers, fulfillment delays, and rising cost-to-serve. Most automation tools claim to help, but they remove some keystrokes and clicks from manual processes rather than fixing the root causes of order friction.

That’s Why We Built the Conexiom Ideal Order Platform

It’s not just about automating order entry—it’s about ensuring every order is accurate, optimized, and profitable before it reaches fulfillment. By applying AI at the critical point of order acceptance, Conexiom eliminates costly manual interventions, increases OTIF performance, and ensures businesses can serve every customer segment—profitably, efficiently, and without disruption.

Our data science team analyzed 20 million purchase orders sent to manufacturers and distributors and found that nearly 3 in 4 (74%) of all inbound PO documents contained at least one issue that would put successful order fulfillment in jeopardy. Part number, price, unit of measure, and ship-to address were the most common data quality issues.  At that volume and complexity, there is no way your team can keep up with fixing all those potential order errors without AI assistance.

With AI-driven validation, correction, and performance insights, the Ideal Order Platform ensures:

• Every order is processed correctly the first time, reducing delays, disputes, and margin erosion
• Cost-to-serve is optimized, preventing unnecessary expenses tied to rework and inefficiencies
• On-time, in-full (OTIF) fulfillment improves, strengthening customer relationships and reducing churn
• Recurring problems are solved at the source through AI real-time insights uncovering actionable remedies for order friction and profit leakage
• Teams spend less time fixing issues and more time on revenue-generating activities

This isn’t just an incremental improvement—it’s a fundamental shift in how sales orders are processed. Businesses that embrace this level of automation will increase efficiency, reduce cost-to-serve, and outpace their competitors.

The industry is evolving. Are you ready to lead?

This Means:

• Smart Order Validation: Instead of simply processing incoming data, the system proactively detects and resolves issues before they cause disruptions, ensuring orders meet business and customer requirements.
• Automated Corrections: AI learns from patterns to correct common issues automatically and helps prevent recurring errors from being reintroduced into the process.
• Pre-Built Validation Checks: More than 75+ built-in validation rules ensure every order aligns with business policies before it’s accepted, reducing inefficiencies downstream.
• Total Order Performance Insights: AI doesn’t just fix individual orders—it identifies recurring inefficiencies, providing data-driven recommendations to address root causes and optimize order processes over time.
• Touchless Order Processing: Fully automated, end-to-end processing ensures orders enter fulfillment clean and correct—without manual intervention.
• Faster Order Fulfillment & Higher OTIF: With a smoother order flow and fewer fulfillment disruptions, businesses see better on-time, in-full performance, reduced costs, and stronger customer relationships.
• Enterprise Grade Reliability: Proven enterprise scale, SOC 2 compliant security, 99.5% service availability, and proprietary machine learning (ML) models ensuring no-hallucination accuracy and data privacy.

Helping Manufacturers & Distributors Do Their Best Work

When businesses eliminate order errors repetitive work at the source, they unlock new levels of operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and financial stability. Companies that proactively prevent errors rather than reactively fixing them gain an immediate competitive advantage. By leveraging AI-fueled automation, organizations shift from a reactive approach—where teams constantly scramble to fix incorrect orders—to a proactive model that ensures orders are accurate before they enter the system.

This shift has profound implications. With fast accurate order processing, customer service representatives can focus on high-value customer interactions rather than chasing down missing information. Supply chain disruptions caused by incorrect shipments are drastically reduced, improving fulfillment speed and reliability. Businesses can scale efficiently without increasing headcount, and financial margins improve as costly rework and order corrections become a thing of the past.

Eliminating accuracy, OTIF, and margin issues at the source changes everything.

• Fewer disruptions: Preventing errors means fewer fire drills, last-minute corrections, and supply chain disruptions.
• Improved customer satisfaction: Fewer order issues mean happier customers and fewer complaints.
• More efficient teams: CSRs spend less time chasing missing data and fixing preventable mistakes—and more time building customer relationships, identifying upsell opportunities, and driving revenue.
• Faster cash collection: Accurate, on-time-in-full deliveries mean fewer disputes and chargebacks, improving Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and accelerating revenue recognition.
• Higher profitability: Orders are correct before they impact margins, leading to stronger financial outcomes.
• A competitive edge: Companies that prevent errors rather than fix them gain a market advantage over competitors still stuck in outdated automation.
• Scalability: With intelligent automation, businesses can handle more orders without needing to increase headcount, driving growth without added costs.

The Future of Sales Order Automation

For years, our industry has focused on automation to move orders faster with less labor. But speed and efficiency alone isn’t enough—accuracy and performance is the missing piece.

The Conexiom Ideal Order Platform is the first AI-powered solution built for manufacturers and distributors that doesn’t just assist with order entry—it ensures every order is ideal before it enters your system as a fast, accurate digital transaction. Unlike traditional automation, Conexiom applies intelligent validation and correction, eliminating errors and other issues at the source. The result? Fewer costly mistakes, higher fulfillment accuracy, and better customer satisfaction.

Conexiom doesn’t just automate order entry; it facilitates trust. With every order verified, corrected, and optimized before fulfillment, your team can stop firefighting errors and start focusing on strategic growth. That’s the power of intelligent automation.