Automation reduces manual workload, boosts accuracy, and eliminates high-volume bottlenecks

The challenge

AGF Manufacturing is a family-owned, U.S.-based company that designs and manufactures components for fire sprinkler systems.

The company depended on a handful of major customers who consistently sent their purchase orders as PDF attachments. On the surface, this seemed simple enough. However, each customer generated PDFs with different layouts, fields positioned in varying places, and formatting that shifted even within the same customer over time.

Because AGF processed thousands of these orders every year, every inconsistency had to be interpreted and each order manually keyed into NetSuite by a small customer service team already responsible for multiple operational roles, turning the process into a daily bottleneck.

During peak periods—particularly around midday, when 15 to 20 orders could arrive at once—the team found it difficult to keep up. The pressure of high-volume surges not only slowed the pace of order processing but also introduced the occasional data-entry error, especially when the team had to move quickly to prevent backlogs.

Meanwhile, AGF recently onboarded a new trading partner through EDI. Compared to the speed and structure of EDI, the manual PDF process felt slow, labor-intensive, and out of alignment with the modernized systems AGF was adopting. Still, AGF couldn’t simply tell their customers to switch to EDI; each customer relied on its own internal processes, and AGF had no desire to impose changes on them.

AGF needed a scalable, customer-friendly way to automate incoming PDFs across all their major accounts. “The more efficiently we can run our operations, the better we’re going to be,” said Rich Pancoast, AGF Controller. “This felt like a pretty big opportunity for us.”

The solution

To solve this, AGF implemented SPS PDF Order Automation, a system designed to translate customer-generated PDFs directly into electronic orders without requiring any customer-side changes. The SPS implementation team worked closely with AGF to map each customer’s unique PDF layout, capturing every field—from line items to addresses to quantities.

Because AGF was already using EDI with SPS and had an existing NetSuite connection, setup was fast and frictionless. The team was able to build on infrastructure that was already in place, which allowed the project to move from mapping to testing to go-live far more smoothly than AGF anticipated.

Accuracy was a major focus, and SPS achieved this by using the customers’ own system-generated PDF templates as the source for extraction. Instead of relying on guesswork or imperfect scans, SPS captured the data from the original PDF files customers already used. AGF described the collaboration as efficient and reliable, requiring no extra work from customers, allowing AGF to go live without disruption.

The results

Once deployed, the system successfully automated 95–96% of AGF’s total order volume, converting nearly every incoming PDF into an electronic order. The impact of automation at AGF was immediate and significant. The most noticeable improvement came in the form of major time savings.

Staff who previously spent hours typing line items were now able to redirect their time toward quoting, responding to availability or lead-time questions, handling shipping inquiries, and giving more personal attention to customer needs. Order entry no longer dictated the pace of their day.

Automation also delivered a meaningful increase in accuracy. With data no longer keyed in manually, common error points—especially address fields and long part-number sequences—were greatly reduced.

Perhaps the most transformative improvement was how the system handled high-volume order spikes. The midday rush became a non-issue. Automated processing meant AGF could ingest and handle large batches without falling behind or forcing employees to multitask.

The efficiency gains translated into a strong return on investment, and the company has stated that the automation has been “well worth the investment.” The reduction in manual labor alone delivered substantial value, but the added accuracy, speed, and staff flexibility strengthened the ROI even further.

In the end, AGF Manufacturing’s adoption of SPS PDF Order Automation modernized its order entry, and more: It relieved operational pressure, improved data quality, and enabled the team to work more strategically. By preserving the customer’s existing workflow while optimizing their own, AGF created a faster, more resilient, and more scalable order processing environment that will serve them well in years to come.