The bottleneck today
In manufacturing, a large share of order intake still runs over email and phone and then lands manually in the ERP. Every order gets retyped, every follow-up question about batch size or delivery date costs a round of email ping-pong. At ten or twenty orders a day, that alone is enough to tie up a full position in order processing, work that rarely needs expertise but costs a lot of time.
If a request comes in outside office hours or through a second channel (WhatsApp, contact form), the risk rises that it’s only handled the next day, or not at all. Follow-up questions about delivery status make it worse: they’re standard questions, but each one interrupts the actual work.
What the AI takes over (a concrete day)
A customer sends an order by email in the morning with article number, quantity and requested date. The agent reads the email, matches the article number against your ERP, checks availability and creates the order automatically, including a confirmation email to the customer with a realistic delivery date.
At noon, another customer asks by WhatsApp about the status of an ongoing order. The AI pulls the current state directly from the ERP and answers in seconds, instead of someone on the team having to look it up first.
In the afternoon a request comes in with incomplete details: the material specification is missing. The agent recognizes the gap and asks the customer directly, instead of guessing or letting the case sit. Only once the details are complete does the order enter the system.
Connecting to your systems
The agent reads and writes directly into your ERP: article data, stock levels, open orders. Via automation software we additionally connect the email inbox, WhatsApp Business and, if present, a separate CRM or warehouse management system. Every data transfer is logged: you can see traceably which agent created or changed which record and when.
Where your ERP has no open API, we check alternative routes, for instance export files with a regular sync. That’s rarely the most elegant, but often a working solution.
Cost & benefit
A single agent, e.g. for order intake, costs 1,500–3,500 € setup and 150–400 € operation per month, depending on order volume and the number of connected systems. With ten to twenty manually processed orders daily, businesses regularly save several hours of order-processing time per week in practice, time that can flow into customer care or production planning instead of retyping.
Honest limits
The agent makes no commercial decisions: special terms, volume discounts or complaints with dispute potential go to your team. With highly individualized orders full of free-text fields, setup needs more lead time, because the rules have to be defined more precisely. And where your ERP simply offers no interface, a connection is usually still possible, but not always in real time; we tell you that honestly before we start.