SwiftOrder management

Swift removes the queue between a customer sending a purchase order and that order existing in your system. The work is not hard, it is just constant, which is exactly why it backs up.

What is sales order automation with an AI agent?

Sales order automation with an AI agent turns inbound customer purchase orders into clean sales orders in your ERP in minutes rather than days. It reads the PO as sent, checks price, quantity, dates and credit against your rules, resolves routine mismatches, and escalates only real decisions. A person still handles off-contract cases.

Swift is Ferrata's sales order automation agent for distribution and manufacturing teams whose order book arrives as PDFs, portal downloads and email bodies in every customer layout but yours.

Hypothetical example (not a client result): a food distributor receives 40 customer PO PDFs before 9 a.m. Thirty-six map cleanly to contracted prices and ship dates. Four have a price conflict or a date the warehouse cannot meet. Those four land in a person's queue with the conflict named; the rest become sales orders and acknowledgements without a re-key.

Ops note: clean sales orders are also the front door for Ops Agents later in the chain, including inventory and fulfillment holds that depend on a trustworthy order record.

How Swift does the work.

Turns inbound customer purchase order PDFs into clean sales orders in minutes rather than days, flagging only what genuinely needs a decision.

  1. 01

    Reads the customer's PO as sent

    Every customer has their own PO layout, and none of them are yours. Swift reads the document as it arrives, whether that is a PDF, a portal download or an email body, and extracts lines, quantities, dates and ship-to without a template per customer.

  2. 02

    Validates against your own rules

    Prices checked against the contracted price list for that customer, not list price. Quantities checked against minimum order and multiples. Requested dates checked against lead time. Credit status checked before anything is promised.

  3. 03

    Resolves what it can

    Part numbers given in the customer's nomenclature are mapped to yours. Rounding, unit-of-measure differences and known abbreviations are handled silently, because escalating those is what makes people ignore an exception queue.

  4. 04

    Escalates only real decisions

    A price that does not match the contract, a date that cannot be met, a customer over their credit limit: these go to a person, with the conflict stated and a proposed resolution. Everything else just becomes an order.

  5. 05

    Acknowledges to the customer

    Order acknowledgement with confirmed lines and dates goes back the same hour, which is where most of the perceived improvement comes from.

Where Swift stops. Swift creates orders inside your rules. Anything outside them stops and waits for a person: off-contract pricing, credit holds, unmeetable dates.

Frequently asked questions

What is sales order automation?
Sales order automation is the path from an inbound customer purchase order to a confirmed sales order in your ERP, without re-keying every line. An AI agent extracts lines, validates them against your commercial rules, creates the order when policy allows, and routes only real conflicts to a person.
Can the agent read customer PO PDFs in different formats?
Yes. Every customer has its own layout. The agent reads PDFs, portal downloads and email bodies as they arrive and extracts lines, quantities, dates and ship-to without maintaining a template per customer. That is what keeps intake from depending on perfect customer formatting.
What happens when a price or credit check fails?
The agent does not force the order through. It escalates with the conflict stated (off-contract price, credit hold, unmeetable date) and a proposed resolution. A person decides. That approval gate is how sales order automation earns trust in production.
How fast do customers get an acknowledgement?
The design goal on this page is same-hour order acknowledgement with confirmed lines and dates for orders that pass your rules. That is usually where customers feel the improvement first, even before your internal cycle-time report moves on the operations side.
Which ERPs does sales order automation support?
This agent is built to work with SAP HANA, NetSuite and Dynamics 365, plus the customer portals and mailboxes where orders arrive. It writes into the same order tables your operations team already runs, so fulfillment sees one clean record.
How long to put a sales order agent into production?
A first agent is live in under 90 days under Ferrata's standard engagement: Assess for 2 weeks, Anchor for 3 weeks to set up the Brain in your environment, and one sales-order workflow on real transactions behind an approval gate for consequential actions.

Your agents are built around your organization.

The way you price, route, approve and escalate is years of accumulated judgment, and it's a real advantage. It belongs to you and it stays with you, we're not asking you to hand over your playbook or fit yourself into someone else's template. We start from how your business already works, encode that logic into agents built for your environment, and leave you with an operation that runs faster with exactly the things that make you good at it still intact.

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Bring us one workflow.

Thirty minutes, no deck. Pick the process that costs you most in people, errors or delay, and we'll pressure-test whether an agent is genuinely the right answer for it.

  • An honest read on whether that workflow is a good agent candidate
  • What the first deployment would involve, and roughly what it costs
  • An honest answer if the sequencing is wrong and you should fix something else first
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