SOUNDS FAMILIAR?
Your Tuesday morning, probably.
If any of these challenges sound like your operation, the fix is within your reach: they follow patterns we've solved before.
By 7:15 the inbox is full of overnight orders, and every one needs rekeying.
One customer sends a spreadsheet with 85 lines. Another writes 'send me the usual.'
A mistyped SKU costs us the freight both ways, and sometimes the customer.
Our best people answer 'where's my order' calls instead of selling.
The only way to handle more orders is to hire more order entry staff.
THE PATTERNS BEHIND THE PAIN
Problems like these follow patterns.
Across every industry we work in, the grunt work that holds growth back keeps taking the same shapes. Distribution and wholesale operations run on two of them.
High-volume knowledge work
What it is
Documents that need judgment at a volume people cannot sustain.
Time-critical operations
What it is
Deadline-driven work where every delay has a price.
Over 70% of invoices, no human touch.
TFS Global, a fleet and equipment services provider, replaced manual invoice processing with an AI pipeline that reads emailed invoices, categorizes maintenance types, and creates work orders in Salesforce. People review only the exceptions.
70%
invoices processed with
zero human touch
zero human touch
~$750k
estimated annual
savings
savings
Real-time
from a 2-3 week
turnaround
turnaround
~10
staff redeployed to
higher-value work
higher-value work
One win leads to another. The first solution created the clean data the next two run on.
Invoice Automation
Cost Intelligence
Fleet Analytics
We turned invoice processing from a manual bottleneck into a scalable, automated operation that supports growth and better customer insights.
NO RIP AND REPLACE
Wraps around how you already work.
QUESTIONS DISTRIBUTORS ASK
Asked by people who run operations like yours.
true
Our customers order however they like: email, PDF, fax, portal. Can AI handle that?
Yes, and without asking your customers to change a thing. OCR and language models read each order whatever the channel or format, match the lines to your SKUs and pricing, and create clean orders in your ERP. Anything ambiguous, a missing part number, an unclear quantity, goes to a person, and the system learns from every correction your team makes.
Margins are thin. What does this actually save?
Manual order entry typically costs tens of dollars per order in labor alone, before you count errors, returns and credits. Automating the routine share of that volume takes cost out of every order and stops the most expensive mistakes, wrong SKUs and mispriced lines, before they ship. We scope every engagement to deliver measurable ROI in the first year, and we map the numbers with you before we build anything.
Do we need new systems, or does this work with our ERP?
It works with what you run. Your Contextual-built AI wraps around your ERP and warehouse systems, reading orders and invoices from where they already arrive and posting clean transactions into the tools your team already uses. No rip and replace, and no asking customers or suppliers to change how they send you business.
What happens to our customer service team?
They finally get to do customer service. When the rekeying stops, the same people handle exceptions, fix what matters and spend real time with customers instead of typing line items. Businesses like yours usually turn that capacity into growth: more accounts and better service, without adding headcount to keep up.
How fast until it is live?
Working software typically lands in weeks three to five, starting with your highest-volume order or invoice flow. Your team tests it on real orders before full rollout, and we stay on after go-live to tune it. Your exact timeline depends on your channels and systems; we map it with you in the first days of the engagement.
NOT YOUR INDUSTRY?
Find the operation that looks like yours.
See what AI could do for your operation.
Every engagement starts with a conversation. We'll respond within one business day.
