From email straight to the warehouse

In an ideal world, every one of your business customers logs into the B2B platform, adds products to a shopping cart and clicks "I order." The order falls into the system, the warehouse gets the picking list, and the package leaves in an hour. But the reality of wholesale trade is rarely ideal.

Key customers have their own habits and systems. Instead of "clicking through" to your store, they generate an order in-house, export it to a PDF (often with a list of dozens of items) and email it to the merchant. This is where the problem begins. Despite a state-of-the-art warehouse, the process gets bogged down at the bottleneck stage, which is the manual transcription of the order.

In this article, I'll show you how to streamline the process so that an order from a PDF goes to fulfillment much faster, eliminating the risk of mistakes.

Why is manually rewriting orders from PDF a "silent killer" of productivity?

As managers, we often focus on optimizing paths in the warehouse, forgetting to order Processing Time.

In B2B, an order is often a complicated statement: 50 types of parts, different variants, specific codes. It takes an employee from 20 to even 60 minutes to transcribe such an order from a PDF file to an ERP or sales system. If 10 such orders are flowing on Monday morning, the sales department is paralyzed by noon.

The business implications are painful:

• Delayed shipping: An order that was received in the morning doesn't hit the warehouse until the afternoon, which means shipping a day later.
• Risk of error: Rephrasing hundreds of product codes (SKUs) is an easy way to get confused.
• Scale lock: More orders mean the need to hire more people just to "paste" them.

the 3 most common mistakes when entering data manually

Manual order processing is a minefield. In B2B logistics, mistakes cost double - you lose out on reverse logistics costs and your reputation. Here's what most often goes wrong:

1. Czech error in product code (SKU) The code SR-10-20-X may differ from SR-10-20-Y by only one digit. The jaded eye can easily overlook this. The result? The customer gets a different product variant than he ordered. Complaint ready.

2. Errors in quantities The customer's order shows "10". Is it 10 pieces or 10 bulk packages? With a quick transcription, it is easy to make a mistake, and the warehouseman will issue what he has entered in the system.

3. Overlooked delivery notes The customer often writes down important information in small print, such as "Entrance from X street." When processing manually, this data is often lost, which ends up causing problems for the courier at the last mile.

Case Study: the race against time, or "the courier leaves at 3:00 p.m."

Let's look at a typical situation at a distributor. It's Friday, 1:15 p.m. A customer emails an urgent PDF order for 40 items. The courier is there at 3:00 pm.

Variant A (Traditional - Manual): The salesman opens the email at 1:30 p.m. He prints out the order and starts typing the codes line by line. He gets distracted by phone calls. At 2:40 pm he finishes. The warehouse gets the order "at five fifteen."The chance of shipping is minimal.

Option B (Automation Support): The merchant uses Dokum. The tool "scans" the PDF file in tens of seconds and extracts data from it into a structured table (e.g. Excel). The merchant receives a ready-made list: Index, Quantity, Price. He quickly checks the correctness and imports the list into the system in one move.The order gets to the warehouse much faster.

In this model, we simply eliminate the slowest part of the process - manual typing.

How does it work in practice? From PDF to data

Implementing automation does not have to mean an IT revolution. Modern tools (Intelligent Document Processing) work in a simple way:

1. Input: You receive your order in PDF, scan or photo.
2. Extraction (AI Parsing): Dokum analyzes the document, recognizes the table and separates line items from unnecessary graphics.
3. Output (Data): You get a clean format (Excel, JSON).
4. Action: You import ready-made data into ERP or copy columns, avoiding typos.

Summary: Speed and precision build advantage

In B2B commerce, customer loyalty is often determined by reliability. If you can efficiently handle an order from an afternoon and ship it the same day - you gain an advantage over your competitors.

Pre-processing automation is a simple way to relieve the burden on your sales department. Instead of being "data transcribers," your people can focus on sales.

Want to see how fast you can turn a PDF into Excel? Send a sample order to Dokum and see how much time you can save on each transaction.