The real cost of keying in emailed orders

Most wholesalers and distributors still receive a large share of their orders by email. Some arrive as PDFs from a customer’s buying system, some as spreadsheets, and plenty are typed straight into the body of the message. Someone then copies each one into the ERP, line by line.

On its own, a single order doesn’t look like much work. That’s why the cost is easy to overlook.

The visible cost: time

Start with the obvious part. Ask the person who keys in orders to time a normal week, from opening the email to saving the order. Include the small jobs that go with it: looking up the customer account, checking stock, checking prices, fixing an address.

A simple worked example (your numbers will differ):

Twenty-five hours a month is more than three working days. It’s also concentrated in the same people, often the ones who know your customers best and whose time is most valuable elsewhere.

The hidden cost: mistakes

Time is the cost people measure. Errors are the cost that hurts.

A mistyped quantity, a price taken from the PO instead of the account, or a product code that’s one character out each cause a chain of extra work:

• the wrong goods are picked and shipped
• the customer queries the delivery or the invoice
• someone raises a credit note and arranges a return
• the correct goods go out on a second delivery, at your expense

None of that appears in the five minutes it took to key the order. A single error on a large order can easily cost more than a month of manual entry.

The cost you only see when it’s busy

Manual entry scales with headcount. In a quiet week it’s fine. In a busy week, orders queue up, the next-day cutoff gets missed, and the people keying orders are the same people answering the phone.

There’s also a dependency risk. If only one or two people know how a particular customer formats their orders, or which product they really mean by “the usual”, holidays and sick days become an operational problem.

How to measure your own

You don’t need a consultant to get a useful number. For one normal week:

1. Count the orders that arrive by email, and note their format: PDF, spreadsheet, Word, or typed in the email.
2. Time a sample of them, including the checking.
3. Note every order that needed correcting afterwards, and why.
4. Ask the warehouse how often they find a problem with an order once it reaches them.

Even a rough week of data tells you whether the problem is big enough to fix, and which parts of it matter most.

When automating order entry is worth it

Order automation tends to pay off when:

• a meaningful share of orders arrive by email, in more than one format
• the same few people do most of the keying
• errors reach the warehouse or the invoice more often than you’d like
• you’re growing, and don’t want order entry to grow with you

It’s less compelling if nearly all of your orders already arrive through a web shop or EDI, or if volumes are very low.

What it looks like when it’s done well

Good order automation doesn’t remove people from the process. It changes their job from typing to checking. Each order arrives already filled in and checked against your ERP, with anything uncertain flagged. Someone reviews it, fixes what needs fixing and approves it in a click.

That’s the approach we take: read the order, check it against your own data, and leave the final decision with your team. If you’d like to work through the numbers for your business, book a discovery call.