Automated order processing, from inbound email to SAP

With hundreds of shipments a month running through a two-person team, there was no margin for error and no time to fix one.

The rules that governed order processing had never been written down:

• Distributors used their own product identifiers, not SKUs
• Orders sometimes needed to be split into multiple SAP entries
• Unit sizes varied by client
• Exception handling was informal - judgment calls made order by order, undocumented

Automating this process meant making that judgment legible before any of it could be automated. The deterministic rules had to be extracted, written down, and validated in close collaboration with the operators who actually held the knowledge.

GenOS Supervisor now owns the workflow end to end, with operators reviewing only what genuinely needs their judgment.

• Trigger: The workflow activates on incoming email, no manual handoff.
• Extraction: Order data is pulled from PDF attachments and email bodies.
• Deterministic first, model second: Explicit rules handle the clear cases before the model ever sees them; the model is reserved for the genuinely ambiguous ones - like a distributor identifier that doesn't directly map to a SAP SKU. Low-confidence matches are flagged for review rather than guessed.
• Splitting: Orders that span multiple SAP entries are split automatically, following the same logic the operators used to apply by hand.
• Human-in-the-loop review: The operator sees an editable table of the extracted order, corrects anything that needs correcting, and approves.
• Confirmation before commit: A final check runs before anything writes to SAP, nothing posts silently.

Operators stay in control of every order. They just no longer touch the routine ones.