In this article, learn about:
- The six points in a supplier’s order-to-cash cycle where manual work concentrates
- What manual order entry costs a growing supplier, and which published cost figures do not apply
- What three named suppliers removed, with before-and-after numbers
- How electronic data interchange (EDI) automation handles purchase orders, acknowledgments, and invoices
A supplier’s order-to-cash cycle runs from the arrival of a retailer’s purchase order (PO) to payment. There are four documents that really drive it: the PO (EDI 850), the acknowledgment (EDI 855), the advance ship notice (ASN, or EDI 856), and the invoice (EDI 810). When a trading partner sends those through EDI, they move between systems without anyone retyping them. When a partner sends a PDF instead, all four steps still happen, with a person manually handling each one.
Those steps are the manual touchpoints. Beyond Meat’s customer service team once counted 30 orders in a single day, and when dealing with PDFs as opposed to EDI documents, order entry can take up a whole day’s work. Counting each touchpoint separately is what makes it removable, one at a time, instead of waiting until the end of an order-to-cash cycle.
What Are the Manual Touchpoints in Order Processing?
A manual touchpoint is any step where a person moves order data by hand. Retyping a line item from a PDF into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is one. So is keying a ship-to address for a single distribution center (DC), or checking an invoice total against a PO on two screens.
Each touchpoint fails in its own way, which is why it’s important to look at the whole map.
- Manual order entry can produce wrong items and wrong quantities
- ASN creation by hand may result in chargebacks at receiving
- Manual invoice matching might cause lost POs and financial discrepancies
Calling all of it “manual work” hides which step cost money. Root cause analysis is essential for fixing the right one.
Touchpoint | Manual State | Automated State | Named Proof |
PO receipt | PDF lands in a shared inbox, no order day and no cutoff window | PO arrives in the ERP as a validated sales order | Beyond Meat: 300 to 500 orders a month flow in automatically |
Order entry and validation | Items, quantities, prices, and ship-to locations keyed by hand | Fields map from the partner’s own document | Beyond Meat: errors reached a customer in 1 to 3% of orders |
Order acknowledgment | Confirmation email sent when someone has time | Acknowledgment returns from the order record | No published figure |
Pick, pack, and label | Labels built from a printed pick list | Labels generated from order data already in the system | No published figure |
ASN creation | Shipping details keyed per distribution center | ASN generated from the shipment record | Grillo’s Pickles: manual keying across many distribution centers led to chargebacks |
Invoice matching | PO, goods receipt, and invoice compared by hand | Three-way match runs across all three documents | Grillo’s Pickles: half a day cut to 20 to 30 minutes |
Acknowledgment and label generation have no published before-and-after number, because they usually get reported inside a broader automation result.
Related Reading: How Purchase Order Acknowledgements Can Transform Your Supply Chain
Why Does Manual Order Entry Cost More as a Supplier Grows?
The cost of a manual touchpoint is the error rate times what an error costs downstream. Before automating, Beyond Meat saw an error reach a customer in roughly 1-3% of orders. A wrong item, a wrong quantity, or a wrong price all made it into the ERP and out to the partner. At 30 orders on a heavy day, that means an error will occur most weeks, and each onewill reach a retailer you sell to as a credit, a return, or a chargeback.
Published cost-per-order figures need care. One cited range puts manual PO processing at $35.88 to $506.52 per order. The same source says companies process only 32.6% of invoices straight through. Both numbers measure the buyer’s side, which includes the requisition, the approval routing, and the payment. That is a different job from a supplier’s order entry. These figures provide context, not a benchmark that suppliers should quote about themselves.
SPS Commerce estimates that up to 5% of revenue, or about 50% of operating profit, is lost to compliance and processing failures. That is an enterprise cost-of-inaction estimate. It covers retail partner failures broadly rather than order entry, so a smaller supplier should read it as the shape of the exposure and not as their own number.
How Much Manual Work Does EDI PO Automation for Suppliers Remove?
Beyond Meat runs order processing for North America and Latin America with a team of three. An additional person covers retail and foodservice distributors across Europe. As the company added distributors in the UK and EU, PO volume grew faster than the team, and most orders arrived as PDFs waiting to be manually keyed into NetSuite.
Once those distributors joined the SPS network, about 70% of the customer base began ordering through automated fulfillment. Order processing time is down roughly 25% over two to three years. The EU role did not need a second hire. Automation absorbed the volume that would have justified one. Onboarding a new distributor took about three months before, and most now go live in a few days.
“SPS Commerce has saved at least 25 percent of our order processing time over the last 2 to 3 years.”
Jessica Powers, Manager, Customer Service, Beyond Meat
What Happens When Customers Send PDFs Instead of EDI?
Not every trading partner will move to EDI, and a supplier is rarely in a position to ask. AGF Manufacturing, a family-owned maker of fire sprinkler components, relied on several large customers who all sent POs as PDF attachments. Each layout was different, fields sat in different places, and formatting shifted over time within a single customer’s documents. By midday, 15 to 20 orders could arrive at once.
AGF implemented SPS PDF Order Automation, which maps each layout and turns the PDF into an electronic order with no change on the customer’s side. Accuracy came from one choice about how the data is read. Extraction runs against the customer’s own system-generated PDF file, not a scan of it. The system now automates 95-96% of AGF total order volume. The error points that dropped most were address fields and long part-number sequences.
“The time you gain on the backside is worth it in a big way.”
Rich Pancoast, Controller, AGF Manufacturing
Unlike EDI onboarding, this changes nothing for the trading partner, which is why it fits the accounts you can’t move.
Related Reading: How To Achieve Order Automation Even When Customers Don’t Use EDI
Which Touchpoint Do Suppliers Usually Miss?
Most automation conversations stop at order entry, and invoice reconciliation is the touchpoint most likely still sitting on your desk. At Grillo’s Pickles, matching POs, invoices, and co-packer bills took hours by hand, and errors there produced lost POs rather than a visible shipping problem.
A three-way match across the PO, the goods receipt note, and the invoice cut that work from half a day to 20 to 30 minutes.
Automating the buy side and the sell side together saved 40 to 60 hours per week of customer-facing work. Order volume went from about 80 per week to between 400 and 600 at peak, and the trading partner network grew from 10 to more than 46, with no added customer service headcount.
“The capabilities SPS has with NetSuite are above and beyond what I could even imagine, so that really leveled us up again.”
Mike O’Halloran, Controller, Grillo’s Pickles
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should a supplier start to reduce manual order entry errors?
Start with the touchpoint carrying the most downstream cost, which is usually order entry. An error there travels to the trading partner and comes back as a chargeback. Reconciliation is often the better second step.
Does automating order processing require every customer to use EDI?
No. PDF order automation turns a customer’s existing PDF into an electronic order with no change on their side. AGF Manufacturing automated 95-96% of its order volume while its customers kept sending PDFs.
Will automation shrink the order desk?
None of the three suppliers here cut headcount. Each absorbed growth instead, and Grillo’s grew order volume increased about fivefold with the same team.
Want To Remove the Manual Steps From Your Order-to-Cash Cycle?
SPS Fulfillment automates PO receipt, validation, acknowledgment, ASN creation, and invoicing. It works with the partners you already sell to, including the ones still sending PDFs.