AI for Canadian commercial distributors and wholesalers.
Order intake from messy email, PDF, and EDI. Customer-service triage. SAP Business One integration shipped, other distributor ERPs scoped on call. 100-day build, founder-led, bilingual EN/FR.
- Order intake agent takes the daily inbox of emailed POs, PDFs, and reorder messages and is designed to convert 60 to 80 percent into structured sales orders in SAP B1 without manual data entry.
- Customer-service triage agent classifies, drafts, and routes incoming customer email. Designed to deliver 2 to 3x CS team capacity.
- Bilingual EN/FR handles francophone customers natively, including Quebec French wholesale terminology.
- Canadian funding (NRC IRAP, Mitacs Accelerate / Elevate) pulled in on eligible scopes. We file the applications.
The four shippable agents for a distributor
1. Order intake agent
Reads inbound order channels (email, PDF attachments, customer portal exports, EDI 850), matches SKUs against your catalog with fuzzy and historical match, flags substitutes for discontinued items, applies customer-specific pricing and account terms, drafts the SO in SAP B1 / Acumatica / your ERP, routes for human approval. Design target: 60 to 80 percent of orders go from inbox to SO without manual entry, validated in shadow mode against your last 200 orders before commitment.
2. Customer-service triage agent
Classifies inbound CS email (order status, payment, return, product question, escalation), drafts the response with attachments, sends or routes for human review. Bilingual EN/FR. Designed to deliver 2 to 3x CS team capacity once the model is dialed in on your specific email patterns.
3. Payment-terms and credit-hold agent
Watches incoming orders against customer credit limits and aging AR. Flags orders that should be held, drafts the customer note explaining the hold, suggests release conditions. Sits between sales and AR. Reduces credit-related write-offs significantly.
4. Vendor-side reorder agent
Watches inventory positions, vendor lead times, and customer reorder velocity. Drafts vendor POs for review. Useful for distributors operating multi-vendor catalogs with seasonal variation.
What ships, week by week
- Wk 1-2Operations diagnostic. Read the inbox, the ERP, the customer mix, the SO error patterns. Output: ranked agent list scoped to your specific volume and customer concentration.
- Wk 3-4Integration spike. ERP integration tested (SAP B1 Service Layer, Acumatica API, etc.). PO format coverage tested against your last 200 orders. Go/no-go decision with honest scoping.
- Wk 5-8First agent built. Order intake in shadow mode. Agent generates SO draft, your CSR creates the SO, we compare. Iterate until the agent is within tolerance.
- Wk 9-12Production launch. Agent live on incoming orders. CSR reviews and approves. Eval framework runs daily. Order-accuracy and order-turnaround metrics tracked.
- Wk 13-15Operator-team handoff. Runbook, eval framework, integration credentials. Your team owns the system.
What this is, specifically
- Implementation, not advisory. The back-half invoice ties to a shipped agent generating SOs from real orders.
- Founder-delivered. Derik is personally on every distributor engagement.
- Bilingual EN/FR. Including Quebec French wholesale and industrial terminology.
- Your customer data stays on your infrastructure. No upload of customer pricing or AR data to third-party SaaS without explicit authorization.
- Vendor-neutral. We do not resell SAP, Acumatica, EDI middleware, or any platform.
- Operator-trained handoff. Your team owns the system after week 15.
ERPs and tools the agent integrates with
- ERPs shipped: SAP Business One (HANA Service Layer)
- ERPs scoped on call (week-one integration spike before we commit): Acumatica, NetSuite, Sage 300 / X3, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, proprietary distributor ERPs
- EDI: 850 (PO), 855 (ack), 856 (ASN), 810 (invoice) via established integration toolkits (TrueCommerce, SPS Commerce, OpenEDI)
- Order intake channels: Microsoft 365 / Outlook, Google Workspace, customer portal scrapes, fax-to-email gateways
- Document parsing: PDF (vision-LLM), Excel, CSV, structured EDI, OCR for scanned POs
- CS systems: Zendesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Freshdesk, native Outlook shared mailbox
Common questions
What does AI order intake do for a distributor?
Turns emailed POs, PDFs, and reorder messages into structured SOs in your ERP. 60 to 80% of orders inbox-to-SO without manual data entry.
Does it work with SAP Business One?
Yes. SAP Business One (HANA Service Layer) is the distributor ERP we have shipped on. Acumatica, NetSuite, Sage 300 / X3, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and proprietary distributor ERPs are scoped on the discovery call (week-one integration spike before we commit).
What does it cost?
Pilot intake agent: CAD 40,000 to 80,000. Full multi-channel intake platform: CAD 100,000 to 200,000. NRC IRAP and Mitacs cost-share where eligible; we file the applications.
Will it handle bilingual customer email?
Yes. EN and FR (including Quebec French) handled natively. Outbound replies match customer's language.
What about returns and customer-service triage?
The CS triage agent is workflow #2: classifies inbound (order, payment, return, support), drafts, and routes. Capacity 2-3x once running.
Related reading
Bring one customer's order pipeline. We scope live.
Thirty minutes with Derik. You leave with the highest-ROI intake or CS agent scoped for your operation: what it does, what it costs, and what ships first inside 100 days.
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