Why Manual Order Entry Is Slowing Down Your Ops Team
Discover how manual order entry is quietly draining your operations team's bandwidth and how modern automation can eliminate this tedious task.
If you're leading operations at a growing company, chances are you're still dealing with a surprisingly analog problem: manually entering purchase orders.
Every week, your team receives sales orders from vendors in different formats — PDFs, Excel files, even faxes. Each one requires someone to open it, interpret it, and manually key the data into your ERP or order system.
Manual Order Entry Wastes More Time Than You Realize
If a single order takes 5–10 minutes to process manually, and you're receiving dozens or hundreds of them a week, that adds up fast. Multiply that across your team, and you're looking at:
Hours of repetitive data entry consuming valuable team bandwidth
Increased errors and rework from manual processes
Processing bottlenecks slowing order-to-shipment cycles
Skilled ops professionals stuck on low-leverage tasks
What Makes Order Entry So Difficult?
The problem isn't just volume — it's variability.
Each vendor has their own order template. Some highlight SKUs, others bury them. Some use clean spreadsheets; others attach PDFs that look like scanned receipts. Many don't follow any standard at all.
This constant interpretation creates multiple risks:
One wrong digit throws off inventory counts
Overlooked line items delay shipments
Double entry creates reconciliation chaos
Why Hasn't Modern Tech Solved This?
It comes down to how tools interpret documents. Basic OCR can read the text — but not understand it. Tableflow combines OCR with large language models (LLMs) to extract meaning, context, and structure from even the messiest vendor files.
A Better Way: Automate Order Ingestion
Modern tools like Tableflow solve this upstream problem by using AI to extract, structure, and sync order data — regardless of the format.
Whether your vendor sends a faxed PDF, an Excel attachment, or a freeform table, Tableflow understands the context and delivers clean, ready-to-process data directly into your systems (like NetSuite).
No vendor templates. No custom scripts. No waiting.
Complete automation for your entire order processing workflow
Eliminate all manual data entry from your order processing
AI-powered extraction with built-in validation and verification
Accelerate your entire order-to-fulfillment cycle
Free up your ops team for strategic, value-add work