Calder and Stone Supply
Purchase orders entered without anyone retyping them
An order intake step that reads PDFs, spreadsheets and scans and writes every matched line straight into the order system.
Calder and Stone Supply · Wholesale · building and landscaping materials distributor, 38 staff, close to 200 stockists
340
Orders handled each week
97%
Matched without manual review
11 days
From brief to first live order
Challenge
Calder and Stone supplies paving, aggregates and garden stone to close to two hundred stockists, and each stockist orders in its own way. Some send PDFs from their own systems, some send spreadsheets, and a few still scan handwritten order sheets.
Two people spent every morning keying these orders into the order system, translating each stockist's product names into catalogue codes from memory. On busy days orders went in late, and a single mistyped code could put the wrong pallet on the wrong lorry.
Approach
Start from real orders. We collected six weeks of past orders in every format and built a matching table from each stockist's own product names to the catalogue codes.
Read, match and write. Each incoming order is read, every line is matched to a catalogue item with a confidence score, and confirmed lines are written into the order system with the stockist's reference.
Queue the uncertain lines. Unknown products, unusual quantities and low-confidence matches wait in a short queue for the sales office to confirm or correct, and each correction is added to the matching table. The pilot started with the fifteen stockists who order most often.
Result
The first live order went through eleven days after the brief, and the remaining stockists were added over the following weeks without changing how they send their orders. Orders now reach the system within minutes of arriving, and the two people who used to key them in spend their mornings on stockist calls and delivery planning.
Stockists kept their own formats, from spreadsheets to scanned order sheets
Uncertain lines are confirmed in one short queue instead of rechecking whole orders
Fewer wrong items picked because of mistyped product codes
Stockists did not have to change anything, which was the whole point. Orders arrive however they like, and by the time we open the queue most of them are already in the system.
Priya Nandakumar
Sales Office Lead, Calder and Stone Supply
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