From emailed POs to booked pallets for a heating and cooling distributor

The situation

A distributor of heating, cooling and ventilation products sells to installers and contractors across the UK. Dozens of orders a week arrive in a shared inbox: some as PDFs exported from the customer’s buying system, some as spreadsheets, and a good number typed straight into the email.

Each order is copied into Unleashed line by line. Someone checks the prices against the customer’s account, looks up stock, and fixes the delivery address when it doesn’t match. The order is then printed and walked to the warehouse. Once it’s packed, the warehouse calls the office with weights and dimensions, and the office books an DPD parcel or a TPN pallet and prints the label.

It works, but it depends on a few people who know the customers well, and it doesn’t scale. Busy weeks mean late nights, and mistakes surface when the customer queries the invoice.

What we’d build

A two-phase platform, each phase useful on its own.

Phase one: order automation. A dedicated order inbox on Microsoft 365, monitored around the clock. Each email and its attachments are read by AI, every field is scored for confidence, and each line is checked against Unleashed for product code, stock and price. Orders wait in a review queue, and approving one creates it in Unleashed as a placed sales order with the customer’s PO number in the customer reference field.

Phase two: warehouse and shipping. Rugged Android devices on the warehouse floor show every approved order straight away. Staff pick from a list sorted by product group, enter weights and dimensions, and photograph the packed order. The platform prices the delivery with DPD or from the TPN rate card, books it, prints the label and ship note automatically, and completes the order in Unleashed, which raises the invoice in Xero as it does today.

How an order flows

1. A customer emails a PDF purchase order to the orders inbox.
2. Within moments it’s extracted, checked and parked in the review queue, flagged as Partial because one price doesn’t match Unleashed.
3. A member of the office team opens it, sees the price warning beside both prices, corrects the line and approves.
4. The order is created in Unleashed and appears on every warehouse device, highlighted because it needs packing before the 3pm next-day cutoff.
5. A picker opens it, which marks it as theirs, ticks off each line, enters two parcels with their weights and takes three photos.
6. DPD returns a price that’s £2.30 more than the delivery charge on the PO, so the order is held for the office to confirm before it’s invoiced.
7. Once confirmed, the shipment is booked, the label prints at the packing bench, and the tracking number is saved to the order in Unleashed.

Pallet orders for delivery more than seven days out are queued and booked automatically once they fall inside TPN’s booking window.

What changes day to day

• The office stops typing orders and starts reviewing them. Their time goes on the orders that genuinely need attention: the low-confidence fields, the price differences and the stock shortfalls.
• The warehouse no longer waits for printed orders or phones the office with weights.
• Every order has a complete history, from the email arriving to the label printing, with a name against each step.
• Unleashed and Xero carry on exactly as before, so reporting and month-end don’t change.

Typical scope

This is close to our Order to dispatch package: order automation first, with the warehouse and carriers following once phase one is live. Optional extras that suit this kind of distributor include address validation (fewer failed bookings) and email alerts for failed bookings and price checks. See pricing for indicative ranges and running costs.