Order Automation for Industrial Distributors

From Emailed PO to ERP Sales Order — Automatically

Conversant AI's order automation reads the purchase orders your customers already email you — PDFs, scans, and spreadsheets — and turns them into validated sales orders in your ERP, with every line resolved to the exact manufacturer part number and priced from your own price lists.

How It Works

How does order automation work?

Order entry becomes a review step instead of a typing job. A purchase order goes from inbox to a validated sales order in your ERP in minutes, through four stages:

1

Ingest

Purchase orders arrive the way they always have — emailed PDFs, scans, and spreadsheets in each customer's own format. No portal, no templates, nothing for your customers to change.

2

Resolve

Every line is matched to the exact manufacturer part number using the manufacturer's own ordering logic — series, dimensions, finishes, and options — not a fuzzy text search.

3

Validate

Prices come from your ERP's own price lists, quantities and units of measure are checked, and the PO's line order is preserved on the sales order.

4

Create

A sales order appears in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, ready to review and release. Lines that can't be resolved with confidence are explicitly flagged for human review — never guessed.

What makes industrial POs hard to automate?

Generic document AI stops at reading the text. The hard part of order automation is what comes after: turning a shorthand PO line into the one part number a manufacturer will actually accept. That takes the manufacturer's ordering rules, not just OCR. Conversant handles:

  • Fractional dimensions (a 41 7/8" cut-to-length door bottom) resolved into the manufacturer's ordering format
  • Model families where one suffix changes the product — finish codes, options, and configuration suffixes
  • By-the-foot versus per-each products, with unit-of-measure conversions taken from the manufacturer's own conventions
  • Multi-part assemblies quoted as a single PO line, expanded into the correct orderable components
  • Ambiguous lines flagged with an explicit review marker on the order itself, so nothing silently ships wrong
  • Corrections your team makes in the ERP are learned overnight and applied to the next order automatically

The same resolution engine powers Pricebook Intelligence, which decodes any take-off or order line into a part number and current list price, and Bid Response Automation, which turns a Division 8 spec into a validated take-off.

Frequently asked questions

How does AI order automation work?

A purchase order arrives by email — a PDF, a scan, or a spreadsheet. The system reads every line item, resolves each one to the exact manufacturer part number using the manufacturer's own ordering logic, prices it from your ERP's price lists, and creates a sales order in your ERP. Lines it cannot resolve with confidence are flagged for human review instead of being guessed.

What happens when a line item can't be matched?

It is flagged, not guessed. The sales order is still created, with unresolved lines marked by an explicit review placeholder so your team can see exactly which lines need a decision. When someone corrects a flagged line in the ERP, the system learns that correction and applies it to future orders automatically.

Which ERP systems does it integrate with?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is supported today: orders are created directly in Business Central with resolved part numbers, quantities, units of measure, and prices from your own price lists. The integration is API-based, so additional ERP targets can be added.

Do our customers have to change how they send purchase orders?

No. The system works on the purchase orders you already receive — emailed PDFs, scanned documents, and spreadsheets in each customer's own format. There is no portal to adopt and no format requirements to impose on your customers.

How is this different from EDI?

EDI requires both trading partners to implement and maintain structured document standards, which most small and mid-size customers never do. AI order automation works on the unstructured documents those customers already send. The two are complementary: EDI for the partners who have it, order automation for everyone else.

See your own purchase orders go through

Send us a handful of real POs and we'll show you the sales orders they become — resolved part numbers, your prices, review flags and all.