Operations Automation
Stop re-entering orders by hand.
Octacer connects those handoffs so an order moves from intake to fulfillment without repetitive re-entry and coordination.
01
Order intake
Orders are captured from email inboxes, PDF attachments, customer portals, EDI feeds, and CRM records.
02
Order extraction and customer matching
Order lines, part numbers, quantities, prices, and shipping details are extracted from emails and PDFs.
03
Validation
Pricing is validated against your price list, contract terms, or prior order history.
04
Exception handling
Orders that fail validation are routed to the right person with the full context attached.
05
ERP posting and fulfillment trigger
Validated orders are created in your ERP as sales orders with correct line items, pricing, and customer references.
06
Customer communication and monitoring
Order acknowledgements are sent to the customer automatically.
Connects to the systems you already run
Today, by hand
- 1A customer email or PDF order lands in a shared inbox or portal.
- 2Someone reads it and manually identifies which customer it belongs to.
- 3Order lines are re-typed into a spreadsheet or ERP screen.
- 4Product codes are looked up to verify they match what the customer ordered.
- 5Pricing is checked against a price list or prior agreement—often in another spreadsheet.
- 6Inventory availability is checked in a separate system.
- 7Credit hold or business rules are checked by emailing finance.
- 8Any mismatch or exception triggers a back-and-forth email chain.
- 9The ERP order is finally created by hand.
- 10Warehouse or production is notified manually—sometimes by printing a pick list, sometimes by email.
- 11Someone manually updates the customer on order status.
- 12Order status is tracked in a spreadsheet that nobody updates consistently.
This isn't a document problem. It's a coordination problem.
The operating rule
Confidence decides the path
High confidence + valid data → update the system and keep an audit record.
Low confidence or an exception → route the full context to a reviewer.
Nothing posts blindly. Once a person resolves the exception, the same workflow continues.
Where it breaks
Order lines re-typed into the ERP
Result:typos, transposed digits, and missing lines that turn into fulfillment errors discovered late.
Customer data checked manually
Result:the same customer gets created twice, or a new shipping address gets missed.
Pricing verified by eye
Result:a customer gets an outdated price, and the discrepancy is found only at invoice time.
Inventory checked in a separate system
Result:an order is accepted for an item that's out of stock, triggering a backorder and a customer service fire.
Exceptions handled by email
Result:every pricing query, credit hold, or SKU mismatch starts a new email thread with no tracking and no SLA.
Warehouse notified manually
Result:fulfillment starts late or not at all because the pick list never made it out.
Customers chase status
Result:your team spends hours replying "let me check" because nobody has a live view of order progress.
Fulfillment errors appear late
Result:mistakes are caught in shipping or invoicing, not at intake, so rework is expensive.
What Octacer automates
Intake
- Email inbox monitoring for order messages and attachments.
- PDF attachment capture and structured file storage.
- Customer portal and manual file upload handling.
- CRM record detection for incoming orders.
Document intelligence
- PDF and email extraction of order lines, part numbers, quantities, prices, and addresses.
- Line-item normalization against your catalog.
- Confidence scoring on extracted data.
Customer and product matching
- CRM account matching by name, email domain, or contact.
- ERP customer record lookup and creation of new ship-to addresses.
- SKU matching with tolerance for variant descriptions and aliases.
Validation
- Pricing validation against price lists, contracts, or historical orders.
- Inventory and availability checking.
- Credit and business-rule checks.
Exception handling
- Automated routing of failed orders to the correct owner.
- Approval workflows with deadlines and escalations.
- Exception tracking with full audit context.
ERP posting and fulfillment
- Sales order creation in the ERP with correct header and line data.
- Warehouse or fulfillment system notification.
- Pick list or work order generation.
Notifications and monitoring
- Customer order acknowledgements and status updates.
- Internal alerts for exceptions and failures.
- Runtime monitoring with error logging.
Not every order should be processed automatically.
- High-confidence, fully validated orders flow through without human touch.
- Exceptions—unknown customers, mismatched SKUs, pricing discrepancies, credit holds—route to the right person with the original order, the extracted data, and the validation failure attached.
- Resolved exceptions continue through the pipeline automatically once the human decision is recorded.
Before & after
Before
Manual coordination
- 01Order arrives by email
- 02someone reads it
- 03someone re-keys it into the ERP
- 04pricing checked in a spreadsheet
- 05inventory checked in another system
- 06finance emailed about credit
- 07warehouse emailed about fulfillment
- 08customer emailed about status
- 09errors found at shipping
- 10rework and a delay
After
A controlled workflow
- 01Order arrives by email or portal
- 02extraction happens in seconds
- 03customer and SKU matched automatically
- 04pricing and inventory validated
- 05exceptions routed to the right person
- 06ERP order created
- 07warehouse notified
- 08customer acknowledgement sent
- 09status monitored end to end
Systems we connect
CRM
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Microsoft Dynamics
ERP
- NetSuite
- SAP
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Oracle
Accounting
- QuickBooks
- Xero
Communication
- Gmail
- Outlook
- Slack
Storage
- SharePoint
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
Don't see your system? If it exposes an API, database, or reliable export, we can usually connect it.
Recommended
Good fit
A repeatable workflow with enough volume to justify automation.
- 01You receive 100+ orders per month via email, PDF, or portal.
- 02Your team re-keys orders into an ERP or accounting system by hand.
- 03Pricing or inventory checks involve a separate system lookup.
- 04Your order exceptions are managed over email.
- 05Your customers ask for status updates your team can't easily answer.
- 06Your fulfillment errors are caught late, at shipping or invoicing.
Set expectations
Not a fit
Some workflows need a different starting point or a human decision first.
- 01You process fewer than 50 orders per month and the current process works.
- 02Your orders are fully placed through a self-serve e-commerce checkout.
- 03Your order volume is dominated by one-off custom quotes that require heavy human judgment.
- 04Your ERP is a legacy system with no API and no reliable export capability.
- 05You have no appetite to change how your team currently handles order entry.
Frequently asked questions
Extraction confidence is scored per field. Low-confidence fields are flagged for review rather than silently guessed. A person can correct the extracted data in a review screen, and the corrected value continues through validation and posting.
No. Octacer connects to your existing systems—NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, HubSpot, and others—via their APIs. The automation layer sits on top of your current stack and post validated orders into the systems you already use.
The order is routed to the appropriate owner with the original document, the extracted data, and the specific failure attached. The owner either resolves the issue (updates a price, clears a hold, corrects a SKU) or rejects it, and the order continues through the pipeline automatically.
A web form only handles orders that start on that form. Most order processing pain comes from orders that arrive via email, PDF, or portal—channels a form doesn't touch. The automation handles those unstructured channels in addition to any structured ones you have.
If you're under roughly 50 orders per month and your team isn't stretched, this likely isn't worth automating. If orders are growing or your team is spending more time on order coordination than on customers, it's worth mapping the workflow.
Automated order entry captures orders from email, PDF, portals, and channels into ERP/WMS with validation and posting — not only orders that start on a web form. The goal is less re-keying and clearer ownership when intake is messy.
Ecommerce orchestration is a governed path: channel event triggers intake, ERP owns the commercial record, WMS owns fulfillment state, and status writes back to CRM/support with verification — so teams are not copy-pasting between tools.
Idempotency keys, source-order IDs, and reconciliation checks stop the same channel event from posting twice. Conflicts route to an exception queue with a named owner instead of silent double-entry.
Each exception type (stock, price, credit hold, bad SKU, failed post) has a trigger, decision, owner, and verification step. Failures escalate with the original document and extracted fields attached — not a shared inbox.
Treat the sheet as a staging surface with field ownership and verification before the first ERP write — then graduate high-volume paths to production sync. Spreadsheet-as-system-of-record is the failure mode; governed handoffs fix it. See
Read the full guide →
Map one order processing automation workflow
The review maps the workflow, finds the constraint, and tells you the first system worth building.